Talk:The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

perfect tense or past
In Special:diff/old/1153261822|Trovatore edit of 06:14, 5 May 2023]], "he had simply sung" is reverted to "he simply sang".

Regarding the comment "... he sang the new lyrics from then on. The ending point is his death, which is not really available as a point in time to end the past perfect" the documentary doesn't know about his death, but we do. Surely you are not suggesting that this grammar constitutes a case of WP:SYNTH!

Saying "he sang" really only tells us he sang it that way once. The perfect tense is consistent with something done over a period of time, e.g. multiple times, and past perfect means it's no longer being done, whereas the simple past tense suggests something that was only done once. Fabrickator (talk) 16:18, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Mm, no, I don't agree with that. What's happening here is that English uses the same verb form for the preterite and the imperfect, expressing both with the simple past.  The sense here is imperfect rather than preterite.
 * The past perfect can be every bit as single-event-focused as the simple past; the difference is that the single event happened before some other event in the past that the reader is supposed to understand from context. --Trovatore (talk) 16:45, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Musical-instrument brand names ("Personnel" section)
I went to a lot of effort to establish these - their identities are almost as crucial to the Lightfoot sound as those of the players themselves. However, someone decided to delete all but one of them, claiming to me on their chat page [sic]: "it's not S.O.P. for personnel sections, I removed the brand names and my rationale is article consistency".

In case a supervening editor sees fit to overrule this deletion, here are the brand-name credits again, in full:


 * Gordon Lightfoot – Gibson 12-string acoustic guitar, vocals
 * Terry Clements – Gretsch electric guitar
 * Pee Wee Charles – MSA pedal steel guitar
 * Rick Haynes – Kramer bass
 * Gene Martynec – Moog synthesizer

Birdman euston (talk) 23:56, 20 June 2023 (UTC)


 * I reverted this edit, no other musical article (if there is, I haven't seen it) list brand names for guitars, bass etc. Hammond organs and Moog keyboards are normally linked as proper nouns. The forms of participation (for example, instruments) should be written in lowercase (except for proper nouns such as Hammond organ or Dobro), delimited by commas, and linked on the first occurrence only. -  FlightTime  ( open channel ) 00:05, 21 June 2023 (UTC)
 * In a quick search for 'Gretsch guitar', for example, I found three musical articles in which it was included in the "Personnel" section. Imo, any systematic attempt by Wikipedia editors to remove the make, let alone model, of musical instrument used in a recording is woefully misguided, for the reason I gave in my original complaint above. Birdman euston (talk) 14:42, 21 June 2023 (UTC)