Talk:Frédéric Chopin/Archive 14

Infobox?
Is there a particular reason why there is no infobox quickly listing the vitals (date of birth / death, etc)?

I'd BOLDly add it, but 1) I'm at work, and 2) if it's missing for such a figure, I would suppose that it would have received it by now if it were desired. I mean, he does have significant, significant N. Jsharpminor (talk) 06:01, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Dear Jsharpminor; please see here. N is of course not a criterion for infoboxes. Previous discussions on this talkpage have not resulted in consensus in favour of creating one.--Smerus (talk) 13:10, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I think it would be good for the community to look at and retire this composer-anti-infobox bias. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 17:03, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Isn't it mostly in place because then you get silly wars over whether to list Chopin's nationality as Polish, French, Polish–French, or French–Polish? And in fact, though I had read that entry in WP:LAME, I totally forgot about it when making the above comment. So, I apologize if I accidentally stepped in a minefield. I really wasn't trying to set the whole thing off. Jsharpminor (talk) 07:29, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I initially came here to ask the question because, as a musician, Chopin and Beethoven are two of my favorite composers, and I had been listening to the Nocturne Op. 9 no. 2 and I was curious as to whether or not Beethoven and Chopin were contemporaries, or if Chopin was closer to the Impressionist period. I was surprised by the lack of infobox. Hence my comment. Again, apologies if I accidentally stepped in a minefield. Jsharpminor (talk) 07:58, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
 * @Smerus: I wasn't saying that N was a criterion for an infobox, just that it would be bizarre for so public an article to have accidentally missed an infobox. There's a threshold of N for justifying an article, then there's another less-talked-about threshold where a topic is so significant that it gets lots of attention almost by default. For example: if the article on George W. Bush did not have an infobox, that would be strange indeed, simply because he's so big a figure. Likewise, I was assuming that the article on Chopin would have all the basic features (e.g. infoboxes) that were wanted, simply because enough editors had noticed the article. Jsharpminor (talk) 02:18, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

In the continuing absence of consensus I have reverted today's addition of an infobox, which was added without discussion. Previous discussions on this talkpage have not resulted in consensus to provide an infobox. Please can editors discuss here whether or not an infobox should go ahead - and provide please reasons for or against - before installing one. I remind editors that a unanimous resolution of arbitrators was that "The use of infoboxes is neither required nor prohibited for any article by site policies or guidelines. Whether to include an infobox, which infobox to include, and which parts of the infobox to use, is determined through discussion and consensus among the editors at each individual article". Thanks, --Smerus (talk) 12:41, 13 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Add infobox: For what it's worth, I favor an infobox on these composer articles and I think it's time for consensus to change. The pro-con arguments about infoboxes can go on ad infinitum and we all know how they work, so instead of endless WP:IDONtLIKEIT versus WP:ILIKEIT debates, I will simply note that I see three editors in the edit summary wanting one (one an anon IP) and two more here supporting it, so that sounds like consensus to me.  And indeed, these composer articles look "bizarre" without one. I see 83643 transclusions of infobox musician and infobox person has 183565.  It's time.    Montanabw (talk)  21:46, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

As there is no "protocol" and Wikiprojects have no authority to ban infoboxes, per the ArbCom decision, I've restored the good-faith addition of the infobox. The infobox provides a brief summary of the salient details of the composer's life and meets the needs of a visitor who just wants a quick piece of information - as demonstrated by the comments from. In addition it provides a structured framework for third-parties and sister projects (such as Wikidata) to gather key information and microformats from our articles and data dumps.

There is never any need for a good-faith editor to ask permission to make an edit and there is no mandate to demand that discussion occurs before an edit is made. If anyone has any reason to doubt the bona-fides of the editors who added and worked on the infobox, let's hear that reason, otherwise there needs to be a sound reason why their edits were reverted. It is dishonest to fob off a genuine question with the reply "Previous discussions on this talkpage have not resulted in consensus in favour of creating one" when a link to the previous discussion held at Talk:Frédéric Chopin/Archive 13 would have shown the questioner that a narrow majority of those commenting were in favour of an infobox. A dissenting minority should not be allowed to hold a veto over the majority and it's time that this bullying of editors unfamiliar with the desperate efforts of those irrationally opposed to infoboxes was brought to an end. --RexxS (talk) 23:23, 13 February 2015 (UTC)


 * I have undone RexxS's edit restoring the box as it is not I think good faith in a discussion to preempt the conclusion before others have made their case (myself for one). I am pretty sure that the Arbcom decision has no implications jusatifying such pre-emption. I shall be posting later today in this thread my reasons for being against adding an infobox (so as to take part in the discussion per se). In the meantime may I say that I agree entirely with Montanabw that it is pointless to have "WP:IDONtLIKEIT versus WP:ILIKEIT debates". In this context, the comments of Piotrus and RexSS, and indeed of Montanabw and RexSS, are all of the nature "ILIKEIT". They are generic please for infoboxes as a concept, but they do not address why or how an infobox would improve this article. I remind editors once again of the Arbcom standard: "Whether to include an infobox, which infobox to include, and which parts of the infobox to use, is determined through discussion and consensus among the editors at each individual article". This discussion should therefore be about Chopin, not about composers (or Wikipedia articles) in general.--Smerus (talk) 07:48, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

I see, with a deep sigh, that an anonymous editor has restored the infobox, without comment or explanation, while the discussion is continuing. I regret this rude behaviour. The enthusiasm with which this editor has thrust this inaccurate (see below) infobox on the article suggests a preference for form over content which undermines the entire concept of Wikipedia as a provider of reliable information. I will offer here some of my pronciple my arguments against an infobox for the article Frédéric_Chopin.

1) Whilst infoboxes are doubtless useful in articles such as, e.g. Polonium, where they can summarize uncontested data, they are not so appropriate in biographical articles where the summary information they present may be unclear or positively misleading. Thus is the present restoration of the infobox at this article (at the time of writing) we are given the following inaccurate or debatable pieces of information:
 * date of birth (there are two alternatives)
 * Alma Mater - certainly wasn't (then) Fryderyk Chopin University of Music
 * partner- Maria Wodzińska was never his partner and the relationship with George Sand was on/off to say the least
 * height - irrelevant, and anyway not sourced.
 * Nationality - not clearcut and a matter of ongoing, and sometimes fierce debate. (See this talk page).

2) The article as it stood before this defacement was accepted by peer editors as FA status - that is, there was no perceived need to add an infobox to improve its quality or accuracy. As the information in the infobox is already (or should be already) included in the article, it can be argued that it is merely duplication.

3) For Chopin, as for many biographical articles, facts cannot often be boldly started and may often need to be nuanced. The issue of nationality has been mentioned. The ambiguities are pointed out in the lede and are covered in the article. A causal reader (e.g. college student) who simply takes information from the box therefore risks being misled. On the other hand, to point out these nuances by expanding the text in the infobox makes it clumsy and repetitive of the article.

4) RexxS raises the red herring of 'metadata' provision by infoboxes. Editors may be aware from previous discussions however that the provision of metadata is not a policy of Wikipedia and that there is absolutely no recommendation or requirement on this basis that can justify infoboxes as a matter of Wikipedia policy. This argument also ignores the Arbcom standard, which I repeat for Rexxs's convenience: "Whether to include an infobox, which infobox to include, and which parts of the infobox to use, is determined through discussion and consensus among the editors at each individual article". I again pint out that this implies that his discussion should therefore be about Chopin, not about composers or Wikipedia articles in general.

5) The opinion of Montanabw that this article looks "bizarre" without an infobox is certainly one to which she is entitled; as I am also entitled to my opinion that it looks bizarre with one. Neither of these arguments however is relevant to the discussion - Montanabw has already correctly pointed out that comment son the basis of ILIKEIT/IDONTLIKEIT are irrelevant and unhelpful.--Smerus (talk) 12:15, 14 February 2015 (UTC)


 * There is far more rudeness when an editor misleads another editor by reverting them with an edit summary such as "per WP protocols". There is no protocol that any good-faith editor needs your permission to edit your articles. WP:BEBOLD is the applicable protocol and you have defied it by lying about the outcomes of previous discussions as an excuse for reverting an edit that you simply don't like. Incidentally, I'll do you the courtesy of addressing you in the second person, even though you fail to accord me the same.
 * 1) Data does not need to be uncontested to be useful in an infobox. The Flat Earth Society contests that the Earth is an oblate spheroid, yet our article clearly states its circumference and other useful data. Similarly, much of a subject's biographical information is well-enough accepted within the mainstream view to be uncontroversially stated as a fact.
 * Chopin's date of birth is generally accepted as 1 March 1810, and I would favour treating that as a simple fact, although if there were sufficient support to give "or 22 February", then we would be giving exactly as much nuance as the lead does. If it's acceptable to simplify the "alternatives" as is done in the lead, then so it is for the infobox. It is hypocrisy to claim otherwise.
 * The infobox that you reverted with gave Chopin's alma_mater as Warsaw Lyceum and Warsaw Conservatory. When you blindly revert, you miss the fact that earlier errors had already been corrected. And that is what should always be done - fix it, rather than "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".
 * Similarly the infobox that you reverted gave his partner as George Sand (1836–47) - a very reasonable précis that meets the spurious objections that you raise above and matches quite well what we find in the lead.
 * Who are you to say that a person's height is irrelevant? It may be irrelevant to you, but we're writing articles for readers, some of whom may wish to know such details. The article makes a point of George Sand's height and knowing Chopin's helps to place that in context. I do agree that it requires a source if it should be challenged.
 * When the lead opens with "Frédéric François Chopin ... was a Polish composer ...", then what is compromised by stating his nationality as Polish in the infobox? That gives the casual reader the information that allows them to place his birth geographically and to gain some idea that he may be of importance to the historical culture of Poland, no matter what the region may have been called at the moment of his birth.
 * 2) WP:Featured Articles are not exempt from improvement and the majority of them have infoboxes - even among biographies. If editors feel that adding an infobox is an improvement, then they have every right to do so. There is no consensus on this article that it should not have an infobox. It is indeed duplication, just as the lead duplicates the reat of the article. An infobox merely collects those key pieces of information together in a predictable place with a clear structure, making the information available for the reader who wants that information about Chopin "at-a-glance", as well as making it available to third-parties in key-value form as well as in microformats. Summarising information is one of the jobs of Wikipedia and there is nothing clumsy about it.
 * 3) I see no argument that the nuances are any less well summarised in than in the lead. If that degree of summary was acceptable when the lead passed FA, how can it now be any more misleading for the hypothetical college student than reading the opening sentences? The issue of nationality has been addressed and the lead quite clearly does not raise any issue of ambiguity. In fact there is absolutely no ambiguity about where Chopin was born and no doubt that Poland claims him as one of their national heros. What more information could anyone want from 'nationality'?
 * 4) Contrary to what you assert, Wikipedia has a mission to make the sum of human knowledge freely available to everyone. That means not just the readers of the Wikipedia website but many others who see our content mirrored or summarised in many different places. And it's not just policy, it's a fundamental principle on which Wikipedia is founded that we enable that. Infoboxes are well-known to be particularly well-suited as a source of information. The majority of the content of Wikidata, for example, is created from automated tools picking up the data that infoboxes in the many different languages makes available. Google uses infoboxes to train its natural language processing tools. These arguments do indeed apply to all articles, but they apply to Chopin. We can say where and when Chopin was born and died, where he was educated, the names of his parents, and so on; that becomes available not just for the "at-a-glance" reader, but for many others who will get indirect access to that information from the infobox. The fact that a similar rationale applies to the millions of other articles that have an infobox doesn't make it any less true in the case of Chopin. The value of provision of this kind of data on Chopin needs to be taken into account when deciding on whether or not to have an infobox on this article.
 * I see also that you've once again canvassed for support at a single WikiProject, whose views you know would be sympathetic to yours, without notifying any other interested projects. This is a clear example of attempting to sway consensus by WP:VOTESTACKING. Your contempt for the basic principles of fair debate is disgraceful, but I suppose I should expect nothing more. --RexxS (talk) 17:59, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Agree with all the above points. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:53, 14 February 2015 (UTC)


 * If I'm counting edits correctly, I see a 4 or 5:1 consensus at this talk page for addition, about a 9:2 editing consensus in favor of keeping the infobox (comparing edits adding or improving the infobox to those removing it) and this on top of the !votes in favor of one the last time around. Yes, the classical music editors remain vehemently opposed to any and all infoboxes, (and I am sure that they will all be showing up here soon) as they have for years and with the same stale arguments that fail to recognize that there are technical, aesthetic, and summary style arguments all in favor. An infobox neither must duplicate the lead nor avoid redundancy with the lead; it is an adjunct to the article as a whole and contains summary material.   Montanabw (talk)  19:46, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, not all classical music editors are vehemently opposed: I for one am vehemently neutral. You remember in December there was a mini edit war at WikiProject Composers about this, discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Composers. I made a proposal there about how to give the project guideline some NPOV, to which you,, responded constructively, but from everyone else there was deathly hush. Does this mean there was agreement to it, or merely readiness to revert its implementation anyway? Would any of you revert if someone did implement it? I just want to add that it's just this kind of childish pantomime squabbling, and personal attacks such as one might expect from brattish 4-year-olds, that led me to delist myself from this project's membership and reduce my activity on Wikipedia. It's the kind of last-man-standing characteristic that the newspaper articles about Wikipedia keep on mentioning. Today's edit war here is about nothing. Are you all enjoying it? --Stfg (talk) 21:06, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
 * At last! A decent classical performer. But that seems a very sensible proposal, Stfg. Thanks for trying to be constructive. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:18, 14 February 2015 (UTC)


 * I was good with the changes you suggested to the wording on the project page. Still am.  And it's high time WP Composers engaged constructively on this.    Montanabw (talk)  23:07, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Here we have a beautiful article about Chopin, carefully researched by thoughtful editors, which now, thanks to the infobox system, says up front, as one of the truly essential facts about Chopin, what his height was. Frankly, I am disgusted -- why should it be a priority to provide a venue for thoughtless editors to leave little deposits like this? Opus33 (talk) 01:26, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Please stop the edit warring on this article immediately. I have [//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_page_protection?action=view&diff=647187778 requested full protection] until this discussion is resolved. --Mirokado (talk) 02:27, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Year of birth
For the casual reader, the different order of Chopin's possible dates of birth in the 1st sentence and the infobox is confusing. If two dates are needed (the French Wikipedia only needs 1 March), they should be listed in the same order. Having only 1 "above the fold" would IMO be better. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 11:34, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Chopin's signature just below the photograph
I rather like the look and contents of the original infobox (at the top). However, some object to Chopin's signature being placed at the bottom of the column. Why not move it to just beneath his photo, as in other biography articles? That way, his artistic autograph embellishes his unique photograph. Please see at the right. Nihil novi (talk) 21:10, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes, if we must have an infobox I'd prefer your one which is actually of (limited) use, although some of the parameters are pretty redundant.♦ Dr. Blofeld  17:34, 28 February 2015 (UTC)