Talk:Georgii Nelepp

Draft:Georgi Nelepp
Please consider using material from Draft:Georgi Nelepp to improve this article. ~Kvng (talk) 14:27, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Question about recent reverted edits
Voceditenore, I apologize for not understanding Wikipedia impermanence. I have carefully read the policies on Verifiability, Reliable sources, No original research, and Correct use of external links. I am happy to add retrieval dates; it will improve the piece. Following your lead, I am prepared to insert the most recent retrieval dates. I’m likewise grateful for the Grove reference. Unfortunately, I cannot comprehend some of your notes due to unfamiliar abbreviations. Of the cuts I grasped, I ask you to reconsider some that perhaps are not obligatory and adversely affect the quality of the article.

To be honest, I felt insulted by some of your corrections that assume I cannot distinguish reliable from unreliable sources or personal opinion from fact [such as (1) and (2) below]. My academic publications suggest otherwise. I’m not uncooperative, just hurt. (1) “Remove patently false sentence”: Your notes do not identify the sentence. Perhaps you mean “Competing with a thousand applicants for admission to the Conservatory, Nelepp won one of seven openings.” It reports the results of competition for limited seats in an elite school. Why is it not only “false” but “patently false”? To support the sentence, I offer three early recognitions of Nelepp’s talent from Russian musical authorities of his day: the director of the Leningrad Conservatory (who auditioned Nelepp), a renowned tenor, and a music critic. This is not “personal commentary,” as you label it. The “patently false sentence” came from contemporary Russian tenor Sergei Givargizova in an Orpheus Radio documentary on Nelepp. Dedicated to publicizing classical music, Orpheus uses a large wide-ranging music library; interactions with Russian and worldwide orchestras, soloists, and other music performers; and the arrangement of concerts and recordings. The Nelepp documentary belongs to a series on 20th c. noteworthy singers. It counts as a “reliable” source by Wikipedia standards. “Reliable sources may be. . . authors who are regarded as authoritative in relation to the subject” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sourcesVoceditenore). I assume that “authors” may include experts presenting material in a documentary. Of course, you may have evidence that the sentence is indeed false. If not, I would like to use it to delineate the process through which Nelepp moved from soldier to opera singer.

(2) “Better source needed”: You mistrust both of the Russian documentaries I use. One is the aforementioned radio broadcast. The other, “Georgi Nelepp: Soviet Opera Star,” was made in 1987 by Kultura, a Russian television network that specializes in the arts. The film includes interviews with the archivist of the Nelepp collection in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, a Bolshoi Theater historian, and a soprano and a director who worked with Nelepp. Why does article material from these Russian documentaries need a “better source”?

(3) Deletion of former reference #3, a list of sources used in the article (such as a monograph on the Stalin Prize and recollections from two of Nelepp’s directors): These sources are the credentials of the article and orient readers to the material that follows. Why delete the list?

(4) Deletion of former reference #31, links to videos and soundtracks of Nelepp’s performances: Removing the performance links deprives readers of a direct path to the opera singing that justifies a Wikipedia article. I know you manage copyrights for Wikipedia but nevertheless want to address the matter from my academic copyright experience. Please note that the Nelepp article provides only links within a reference, not the “click here” videos on some article pages. Sorry, I don’t know the technical name for this arrangement, but the Wikipedia article on Caruso contains three of them, The Bartered Bride entry, four.

I think the footnoted Nelepp performance links are analogous to a bibliography containing the names of copyrighted books. Both are lists of sources. Neither incorporates copyrighted material. The bibliography does not violate the copyrights of copyrighted books on it; a list of sites containing Nelepp’s music does not violate the copyrights of linked videos. Links are not copyrighted. The 19th c. Russian operas are public domain (https://iclg.com/practice-areas/copyright-laws-and-regulations/russia). I’ll delete the link to Shapiro’s The Decembrists.

The opportunity to hear Nelepp sing, in my view, is too important to relegate to external links. In any case, Wikipedia policy dictates that “Links in the ‘External links’ section should be kept to a minimum.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links).

(5) Deletion of former reference #30, two links to pictures of Nelepp in costume or street clothes: One leads to five pictures in the Bolshoi Theater Museum’s commemoration of his 110 birthday. The other accesses a small collection of photos from various Russian sources. Directing readers to sites that present copyrighted images does not, in my understanding, violate the copyrights of those images. Again, links are not copyrighted. Perhaps I should add that the publicity shot of Nelepp on the article page has been recently accepted as fair use by a Wikipedia administrator. I wrote an argument using the Wikipedia 10 criteria of fair use. (6) Deletion of former reference #8, links to social media and forum discussions of Nelepp’s alleged career as a Stalin informant: This is a controversial and important part of his legacy. Both sites (a forum in Kino Theater’s Nelepp entry and a vk.com discussion of Nelepp) contain sympathetic responses to Nelepp even in the KGB context. In the recent Teahouse discussion of Nelepp references, Tenryuu wrote, “social media discussions are not seen as reliable independent sources.” However, I’m not using these discussions as reliable independent sources of fact. I am not weighing them to determine, say, whether Nelepp did indeed work for the KGB. Rather I am invoking the discussions as expressions of fan sentiment, specifically a respect for Nelepp regardless of his possible secretive work for Stalin. Vishnevskaya’s account of the spitting incident presents a characterization of Nelepp as an informant. However, there is a more recent depiction. A blanket prohibition of social media sources regardless of their usage leaves me inaccurately with only Vishnevskaya.

(7) “Remove ref to Wikipedia”: My reference was to the Georgi Nelepp article in Russian Wikipedia. Why can’t I refer to the “free encyclopedic” treatment of Nelepp in his homeland? Thank you for considering my views as author. What’s the next step in the collaborative editing process? Also, what is the meaning of the alphabet letters you inserted before some of the references? Opera Snob (talk) 14:07, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Voceditenore, I've never done this before and don't know how it works. I was told I could communicate with you by putting messages on the article talk page. I did and am yet to hear from you. Again, I don't know how fast or slow this works. In any case, I have carefully considered your edits and responded. At this point, I'm going to revise the text based on the changes I suggested. I hope that's okay. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Opera Snob (talk • contribs) 01:54, 18 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Opera Snob, you are to be commended for expanding the article. However, you also need to accept that many of the things you included and the way you included them are not appropriate, and indeed directly in violation of key Wikipedia policies. All of us learn by doing and most importantly by observing the subsequent editing of articles we have worked on. I positively cringe when when I look at some my additions to Wikipedia when I first started here 14 years ago, despite the fact that I am also a published academic author (although not in this area). Editing Wikipedia is a joint effort, not the place to publish something that you do not want altered. That's what personal websites, blogs, and magazine articles are for.


 * Had you notified me of this discussion, I would have responded earlier. I have over 11,000 pages on my watch list and have been actively working on other articles in the last week. It is very easy to miss additions to talk pages unless I am pinged to the discussion or notified on my talk page. Many thanks to Marchjuly who had the courtesy to explicitly notify me of this discussion. Below, are my responses to each of your points.


 * (1) The sentence I removed was patently false because he did have musical training—at the Leningrad Conservatory as you stated further down. Plus, you provided no reference for that assertion, if indeed it was actually the opinion of Sergei Givargizova in an Orpheus Radio documentary as you now state, then you should have referenced it as such. You cannot write it in Wikipedia's "voice". For one thing it is not neutrally worded, and for another it is the unreferenced opinion of someone else. Nevertheless it is confusing to the reader to assert in the lead that Nelepp  when he clearly did have training. Further down you also stated . That was after his training at the conservatory, as were his debuts at the Kirov and the Bolshoi theatres.


 * (2) As for the reliability of the documentaries, in some of your references, you state "as translated by Suzanne Ament of Radford University". Translated where? Were the translations or any information from them published by Ament? If so, where? The documentaries are reliable, although not optimal sources. However, the validity of the interpretations you draw depends on who translated them.


 * (3) The list of sources used etc. and how you personally put together the article is a metacomment that does not belong in the article text or in a footnote. The sources used in the article are obvious from the individual inline citations. Using footnotes/references to comment on the text or suggest links to videos is completely inappropriate. If you wish, you can add a section here to the talk page on how you sourced the article and why, but not in the article.


 * (4) Links to videos so the reader can hear Nelepp are appropriate only in a separate External links section. Feel free to create such a section and re-add them there. There doesn't seem to be an excessive number of them. But please note that you must ensure that none of the videos recordings you link to are copyright violations. We are not allowed to link to copyright violations, especially those involving audio and video. Linking to a source book or article is not a copyright violation because it links to the original source. Likewise linking to a copyright recording is OK, provided you have clear evidence that it was posted on the official YouTube channel of the recording company or the artist.


 * (5) Links to visual material belong in the External Links section. Again, feel free to re-add them there. They do not belong as references. Also, never link simply to Google search results. Provide a separate unique link for each image.


 * (6) Re the deletion of former reference #8, links to social media and forum discussions of Nelepp's alleged career as a Stalin informant are entirely inappropriate: (a) forums, Amazon customer reviews, etc. are not reliable sources and cannot be used. If the internet reaction to him and his life has been written about and published in a reliable source, then it can be included with a reference to that source. Wikipedia is not the place to publish your own interpretations of what you find on the internet. Please read No original research and Reliable Sources and their linked pages.


 * (7) Wikipedia is not considered a reliable source and should never be used as a reference. There is no need whatsoever to add a link to the Russian WP article in the text or even in the external links. In the column on the left hand side of the article under Languages, all the foreign-language Wikipedia articles on Nelepp are linked. As you can see, in addition to the one on the Russian Wikipedia, there are articles on him in the German, Ukrainian, Arabic, and Japanese Wikipedias. When you say, I assume you mean notation like this:
 * Giving each reference a name such as the  above allows the reference to be used multiple times in the article without having to repeat it each time, cluttering up the references section, cluttering up the text in the edit window, and obscuring how often the reference is actually used. In the example above, all subsequent uses of that reference are simply done via Citing sources has very useful guidance on the proper way to reference.
 * Voceditenore (talk) 09:11, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Voceditenore (talk) 09:11, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Georgii Nelepp editing concerns
User:Voceditenore    {{Yo|Voceditenore} Opera Snob (talk) 21:44, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

Voceditenore, thank you for answering my “Talk” post. Not that it matters, but I see the reasons for many of your changes. Of the dozens of rules you name I don’t find any that the following changes will break. Please reconsider.

1. Restore the sentence you call “patently false”; it is true and valuable to the article. A substantial component of my academic research has been writing biographies of historical and contemporary persons. Biographers commonly identify sequences of events leading to significant outcomes in the subject’s life. They do this by compiling data from the subject’s life.

The “patently false” sentence names two precipitous, youthful choices Nelepp made without which he would not have become an opera singer. "Nelepp ascended from a farmhand to the heights of Russian celebrity by joining a revolution and competing to sing opera without any musical training." The chain of events is biographical fact, not opinion.

Choosing to participate in the Russian Revolution, Nelepp moved from farmhand to soldier and eventually to Leningrad, home of the Kirov. A second pivotal decision took him from soldier to opera singer—choosing to audition for admission to the Leningrad Conservatory despite his lack of formal musical training. The phrase “competing to sing opera without any musical training” refers to this audition, the sine qua non of Nelepp’s opera career. Nelepp did indeed compete to sing opera while musically uneducated; the sentence is true.

You excised the sentence claiming, “it is not neutrally worded, and. . . is the unreferenced opinion of someone else.” This is untrue. The sentence is written in the third person (detached) voice and is not an opinion but a summation of biographical facts reported in the article. There is nothing conjectural about it. The sentence explains the outcome in Nelepp’s life that earns him a place in Wikipedia, opera performances.

2. Curb your chauvinism towards Russian sources. Georgii Nelepp is relatively unknown outside of Russia. Reasons include his death at the age of only 53, and his notoriety as an alleged Stalin informant. There was no English Wikipedia article on him until I wrote one. The article necessarily rests on sources in Russian.

Online tools such as Google Translate make Russian websites accessible in English.

For other translations, I have turned to Suzanne Ament (Ph.D. Indiana University), an academic specialist in Soviet history. She is fluent in Russian, studied in Moscow and Leningrad, and holds the rank of Professor in the Radford University History Department. Given Nelepp’s obscurity, there is no publishing market for Dr. Ament’s translations of documentaries about him. However, Dr. Ament did recently publish the monograph Sing to Victory! Song in Soviet Society during World War II (Academic Studies Press, 2018). She brings to her Nelepp translations expertise in both the period in which he lived and Russian music. She translated in either my office or my home. We discussed the material as she progressed.

Wikipedia requires sources to be accessible to readers, and the online Russian sources I use certainly are. However, by removing their web addresses you have deliberately blocked reader access to a Kultura film documentary on Nelepp, an Orpheus Radio documentary on Nelepp, the Kino Theater Nelepp entry, and the Bolshoi Theater’s commemoration of Nelepp’s 110 birthday. I can see no reason for this.

In my last post I provided information on the two documentaries that shows their soundness by Wikipedia standards. Their publishers are dedicated to the arts and they feature interviews with Russians considered to be authorities on Georgii Nelepp, such as the archivist of the Georgii Nelepp collection in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts. Kino Theater is a Russian website dedicated to film actors, movies, and reviews; it features a biography of Nelepp and commentary on his work and the same for other opera singers such as Maria Maksakova (II). You withheld even the Bolshoi Theater web address. The Nelepp commemoration there is in English.

Without giving any reason, Marchjuly pegged both Russian documentaries as illegal uploads. S/he wrote that people “upload stuff created by others without the original creators permission to do so. Those YouTube videos you link to appear to be a case of the later and thus links to them cannot be added to any Wikipedia page.” However, Marchjuly doesn’t say what exactly makes the documentaries “appear to be” pirated. On the other hand, I have actually watched them, and described to you their publishers and their content, all of which suggest the documentaries are authoritative Russian treatments of a Russian tenor.

The legitimacy of the Kultura film on Nelepp is confirmed by the existence of other online Kultura documentaries with the same unrestricted access as Nelepp’s e.g., Kultura films on three of Nelepp’s Bolshoi colleagues: Ivan Koslovsky, Sergey Lemeshev (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCClEvozezs), and Maxim Mikhailov (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URWslGXioUs).

What Wikipedia rule dictates that readers cannot have the web addresses of online sources? Another of your edits demeans Russian presentations. In the initial references to each of the two documentaries, you wrote in superscript “better source needed.” Unfamiliar with the Russian sources, you nevertheless announced their inferiority. You disparage to the reader precisely the information that comes from Nelepp’s own culture and incorporates sources that are inaccessible here, e.g., a Bolshoi Theater historian. The documentaries constitute the richest collections of data I have found on Nelepp. If by “better source” you mean a source in English, there isn’t one.

Why do you dismiss Russian expertise?

(3) Lift your restrictions of my editing privileges.

Marchjuly quickly reverted my insertion of the aforementioned web addresses to your version of the article in which they are missing. I expect reversion will likewise be the fate of any future contributions I attempt to make to this article. Knowledge doesn’t matter; obedience is everything. Sadly, Wikipedia has turned editing into policing and you certainly play the part.

You have used regulations only to delete, not to enhance. You have purged from the article, among other things, direct access to online Russian sources, respect for legitimate Russian sources, and fact-based biographical summation.

Given the workload you mentioned, I believe you read and edited in haste, to the detriment of the Georgii Nelepp article. Your frenzied imposition of rules is mechanical and thoughtless. You seem unable to take into consideration circumstances that call for a more perceptive application, e.g., sources in a foreign language. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Opera Snob (talk • contribs) 21:44, 18 June 2020 (UTC)


 * , I took a lot of time to carefully read, re-read both the article and your previous comments, and answer you at length above. I do not appreciate your rude reply replete with personal attacks. Please refrain from that in the future. As to your latest points:


 * I have rephrased your original sentence to make it coherent, neutrally worded, and no longer misleading. I have added to the lead:


 * The two documentaries (the content of which does not have published translations) are far from ideal. I have nevertheless removed the Better source needed tags from the text. Although bear in mind that another editor may well restore them.


 * I have no idea what you are talking about in terms of the links to the Russian sources having been removed. The YouTube videos of both Russian documentaries are currently linked in the citations as are the Bolshoi Digest article about his 110th anniversary, the Marinski Theatre article, and his biography on Kino. Note also that this edit of yours was reverted by  in part because you added duplicate links to the videos in the citations. They were already there. All you did was make a confusing jumble out of the properly formatted and linked citations.


 * As for the multitudinous YouTube videos of Nelepp's performances, they do not belong in citations. Those videos which are not copyright violations can be added as individual links in an External links section, as I said above in points 4 and 5.


 * I repeat, however. It is never appropriate to use forums and user-generated content as references or for you to conduct original research or add your personal commentary on the subject. It is also never appropriate to link to search results as either external links or as citations or to use inline citations for listing external links which do not serve as references. These are longstanding Wikipedia editing policies and guidelines. If you disagree with them then go to the guidelines talk pages for WP:EL, WP:RELY, WP:NOR, WP:NPOV, WP:VERIFY, WP:COPYLINK, and WP:MOSLAYOUT and try to get them changed. Repeatedly asserting that you are right and the rest of Wikipedia is wrong here on this talk page will get you nowhere. I have no intention of wasting any more of my time on explaining and re-explaining these issues to you. Voceditenore (talk) 14:45, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Copyright status of the two documentaries used as references
Further comments re the copyright status of the two documentaries used as references. Per WP:COPYLINK, we cannot link to a site which displays copyright material without a reasonable assurance that the uploader of that material either owns the copyright or has permission from the copyright holder to upload it. Both were problematic in that respect. To that end, I have found the original site of the Kultura filmed documentary, substituted that URL (to which we can definitely link) and given full bibliographic data. The reference for that now reads as:


 * Vilenkina, Irina (2009)."Георгий Нэлепп – звезда советской оперы/ Georgi Nelepp – Soviet Opera Star" (documentary film). Russia Kultura. Retrieved 20 May 2020 . Unpublished English translation by Suzanne Ament of Radford University.

The radio documentary is still potentially a problem. It was uploaded on YouTube by what appears to be the daughter of Sergey Givargizov who was involved in that documentary, although it is unclear whether he owns the copyright. However, the YouTube page does say that the music on the documentary has been licensed to YouTube by the copyright holders. In case there is a consensus to remove the link, I have added as much bibliographic information as possible from the YouTube page, although this may not be completely accurate. The date is unclear, and "Murmansk Radio" is vague. Was it actually Radio Orpheus? The reference now reads like this:


 * Murmansk Radio (c. 1999). "Георгий Нэлепп - слава и гордость Мариинского и Большого театров/ Georgy Nelepp: Fame and pride of the Mariinsky and Bolshoi theatres" (part of a radio documentary series by Sergey Givargizov on outstanding singers of the 20th century). Retrieved 28 April 2020 . Unpublished English translation by Suzanne Ament of Radford University.

Voceditenore (talk) 15:44, 20 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you for taking the time to track those documentaries down. My main concern about the YT links (as I tried to explain User talk:Marchjuly/Archives/2020/May to ) had to do with whether the links were in violation per WP:YOUTUBE, WP:COPYLINK and WP:ELNEVER, not whether the documentaries themselves were considered to be reliable sources. I also expressed the same concerns at WT:OPERA and User talk:Beetstra/Archive 20. When I removed the links, my edit summary did mention why the links were removed, but Opera Snob's comment posted above seems to misunderstand why the links were removed. Opera Snob only quoted part of what I posted on my user talk about this. The entirety of my post was as follows:  The two YT videos that were linked to don't appear to be uploaded to official YT channels of the copyright holders of the documentaries. Looking at some other the other content uploaded to those two channels gives the impression that YT uploaders are fans of operas who are just uploading content that they want to share with others; that's a nice thing perhaps, but it doesn't make them the copyright holders of such content. People upload songs, videos, etc. they like and want to share with others all of the time to YT, but that doesn't make them the copyright holders, and relevant policy states we shouldn't add links to such things unless we are sure they are. Wikipedia doesn't require that we add links to every source that is cited in an article per WP:PUBLISHED; so, if we see a documentary or hear a radio program (even if we see it on YT), we can still possibly cite it as a source per WP:SAYWHERE even if we cannot provide a link to it for others. Sometimes we might be able to provide a WP:CONVENIENCE link, but only if it's not a problem per WP:COPYLINK as explained in WP:CONVENIENCE. Regarding the radio documentary, the songs themselves may no longer be eligible for copyright protection or may have been released under a free-license by their copyright holders, but the radio program itself is in a sense a WP:Derivative work which likely has its own copyright independent of the songs. Being involved in creating a documentary doesn't automatically make a person the copyright holder of the documentary (it could've been a work for hire). Moreover, being the daughter of someone who worked on a documentary wouldn't make the daughter the copyright holder just because her father/mother was (unless copyright ownership was transferred through inheritance; so, once again, if the YT upload's copyright status is unclear, the radio documentary itself can probably still be cited as a source, but a link to it on YT probably shouldn't be added. -- Marchjuly (talk) 00:36, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Marchjuly, I agree with your analysis of the copyright status of the radio documentary on YouTube. I'm going to de-link it in the citation. The citation still has the full title in Russian making it easily found via Google search for anyone interested, e.g. . Best Voceditenore (talk) 15:31, 22 June 2020 (UTC)