Talk:Tim Page (music critic)

WP:COI
Hi, Mitegap. Please carefully read the Wikipedia policy WP:COI. If you add information to your entry (it is better not to edit your own entry) or any WP entry, you need to cite a source that will verify that information. Click on WP:V for more information. Citations should include the author's name, the title of the article or book (and page number), publisher and date. If it is an online source, also the url. One way that people can contribute to articles where they have a conflict of interest is to suggest changes on the talk page (together with the suggested citations) and let other editors add the information to the article. Best regards, -- Ssilvers (talk) 16:01, 5 January 2012 (UTC)


 * No problem.  I'm fine with it now.   I rarely post to my own site on Wikipedia but when it is suggested that I have gone out of my way to slam all prodigies, that is simply not true and I feel required to defend myself.   I've taken a lot of slander on websites in the past few days and Wikipedia, one hopes, is one place where one can expert factual accuracy and a certain fairness toward all involved.    Best, Tim Mitegap (talk) 22:48, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Looks good to me... I like the rewrite much better than the original text, actually. Best, Markvs88 (talk) 01:22, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

"Cute kid" brigade?
I actually think this edit makes his views less clear. First of all he said he wanted to provide the full quote but he actually removed the first part of the quote that said, "the prodigy syndrome ... has become a major ill." Changing "Page has opposed professional careers for young artists" to "Page has opposed what he considers the premature exploitation of young artists" makes it sound like he is okay with the exploitation of young artists as long as it's not "premature". I know that's not what he meant to say but that's how it reads. He also added, that he "has also championed the early careers of violinists Midori and Hilary Hahn and the pianist Evgeny Kissin, all of them in their teens when Page first wrote about them," but it doesn't explain why they are an exception. Why did Page "champion" the early careers of those artists and why did he feel they were not part of the "cute kid brigade"? For An Angel (talk) 14:01, 6 January 2012 (UTC)


 * I was simply annoyed by the fact that some Wikipedia "editor" had suggested that I was some crazed person going around stomping on young talent.  I gave good reviews to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of young artists -- this is verifiable if anybody is willing to do an objective search of my thousands of reviews over 30 years.  Midori, Kissin, Ma and Hahn are spectacular talents who have gone on to decades of solid work, improving their artistry (which was always remarkable) over time; they were also permitted time to perfect their art.   Nevertheless, I am always sorry when I see talented youngsters pushed into the spotlight before they are ready, as I believe happened recently with a young singer on a television program.   I've stated my piece on this particular child, along with my best wishes for her future, but I have concerns that she is ruining her voice by, yes, premature exposure (and wretched training).   Time will tell whether I am right or I am wrong: for the record, I hope that I am wrong.    Still, reporters write "the first rough draft of history," and I thought an objective opinion of what was going on right now might be of help.   Those who aren't part of the music industry can have no idea of how many 13, 14, and 15 year olds who are presented simply because they are 13, 14, and 15 -- who then cannot find a gig anywhere by the time they are 20 or 30.    Usually, it was their "cuteness" that led orchestras to hire them in the first place, and nobody gets "cuter" as they get older, so a lot of them end up on the trash heap by 25.   And it is a terrible shame, because they are likely to become better and deeper musicians in maturity if they are trained carefully and not exploited.    Mitegap (talk) 16:25, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

BLP
Please note that all information currently tagged as cn is liable to be deleted at any time, as per WP:BLP. This is one of our strongest policies and shoud be closely followed. - SchroCat (talk) 18:32, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Suggestion
May I suggest that the balance of the article is off as it stands? Disclosure: I'm acquainted with Tim, but not quite a friend. I am however another career arts journalist, and I've followed his work. It seems to me that the emphasis here on the young-artists business and the Marion Barry business is untoward. The entry contains one sentence on his Pulitzer, but a paragraph each on the aforementioned items. Why is that? Treygraham (talk) 04:50, 3 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Hello! I agree that the balance is off: more information is needed about Page's life and accomplishments.  The proper remedy for a person with a WP:COI concerning the page is to (1) do research to find high-quality, third party (independent) sources of biographical information about Page and then (2) to write some suggested paragraphs about him here on the Talk page, citing those sources as in-line references.  Then, someone may be willing to review the suggested paragraphs and put them, or a version of them, into the article.  I am not the right person to help with this, because Page has accused me of bias.  You can see good examples of journalist biographies on Wikipedia at Peter Jennings, Mark Satin, Horace Greeley and Margaret Fuller.  All the best, -- Ssilvers (talk) 07:23, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

letter to Wikipedia
My name is Tim Page and I am the author or editor of more than 20 books. I worked at the New York Times, Newsday and finally the Washington Post, where I won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1997. I am currently a full professor in two departments at the University of Southern California.

And yet, due to the repeated intrusions of two demonstrably hostile editors of my page, one would think that all I've done in a career that stretches back almost 50 years, is beat up on all young prodigies and sass back to the late Washington D.C. mayor Marion Barry.

I would suggest that these two editors -- SSilvers and especially SchroCat -- have determined to give undue weight to two minor events in my career, with the specific intent of distorting my career


 * Full letter, which may be helpful.   It is the UNDUE WEIGHT that I object to.

My name is Tim Page and I am the author or editor of more than 20 books. I worked at the New York Times, Newsday and finally the Washington Post, where I won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1997. I am currently a full professor in two departments at the University of Southern California.

And yet, due to the repeated intrusions of two demonstrably hostile editors of my page, one would think that all I've done in a career that stretches back almost 50 years, is beat up on all young prodigies and sass back to the late Washington D.C. mayor Marion Barry.

I would suggest that these two editors -- SSilvers and especially SchroCat -- have determined to give undue weight to two minor events in my career, with the specific intent of distorting my career

In the first instance, SSilvers (who is the editor of all the pages devoted to the prodigy Jackie Evancho) has been trying to turn me into a kiddie-stomper for a single article I wrote about Ms. Evancho in December 2011. OK, it was a negative article but I think a fair reader would glean that it was mostly about the music business and the way it eats its young -- a warning against premature exposure. Others may differ, of course, but to turn this one article (buttressed with a short paragraph in a 2000-word reflection on the highs and lows of a career in music criticism) into some kind of personal creed is preposterous. If somebody were to write a 3000 word piece on my work, it might have a place, but I've written hundreds of very positive reviews of young artists and to make this the centerpiece of my career is a clear case of original research -- and shoddy research at that.

I'm always uncomfortable touching up my Wikipedia page but I've done it on a couple of occasions, beginning when somebody suggested I wrote a book called "Descent into Madness: My Struggle with Homosexuality" back in October of 2008. (The fact is that I am a straight man, divorced twice, with three children and to refer to my Asperger Syndrome as "madness" is clearly slander.)   And so, in 2012, I felt I needed to defend my work and add the names of some of the artists I had nurtured when they were very young: I included Hilary Hahn, Evgeny Kissin, and Midori (all teenaged when I first reviewed them -- indeed, I wrote the very first major profile of the last of these). There was some back and forth editorial discussion but we finally came out with what seemed a fair piece -- hardly fawning but with no errors of distortions of fact.

As such, it came as a surprise when I visited the page a month or two back and found that SSilvers had restored the material about Evancho, including my distinctly grotesque image of her onstage persona that I chose deliberately to make a point about what Evancho's handlers were doing to a talented child. At the same time, all the other prodigies I had supported were removed from the piece, leaving the impression that my dearest wish was to stomp all over child stars. Add to this the fact that SSilvers had called me a "thoughtless, nasty man" in talk pages on Wikipedia. As a journalist, I would recuse myself from writing about anybody I disliked so much, and to simply stick this in as the longest paragraph of my biography was clearly malicious.

I did my best to correct matters and though I'd found an ally in SchroCat who removed the corrections and wrote a frosty note, but DID explain the Wiki policy on sourcing. He said he neither knew nor cared who had written the Evancho restoration (this is beginning to sound like Tudor politics!) and said he had no time to make the corrections himself, but seemed a decent enough person. So I learned how to put the references into the piece, spending most of an afternoon on this and not doing a terribly good job on it but hoping that we had finally managed a fair appraisal.

He took out almost all of the corrections (some of the newspapers are no longer allowing early work to be presented without cost) and then added a long paragraph about an unfortunate blow-up I had with the late Marion Barry in 2007. Talk about undue weight! Barry was a controversial man with many supporters and just as many detractors -- I had been bullied by his staff when I asked them to take my address off their mailing list, and I overreacted, after which I apologized. Bingo -- end of story, until SchroCat decided to bring it up seven years later. If you wanted to mention everybody who has ever written negatively about Marion Barry, you'd have to expand your bandwidth -- and now this is the longest paragraph in my biography! Moreover, my leave of absence with the Post had been set up LONG before this took place.

Look -- I love Wikipedia. It's one of the great joys of on-line life. I go to it at least two or three times a day. But this sort of attack really isn't cricket. I'm not going to compare it to the Siegenthaler affair -- there is at least some truth in what these editors have chosen to glorify. But it's a little like a bio of Roman Polanski that talks mostly about his long-ago rape allegation and ignores the fact that he made "Chinatown."

I'm embarrassed to have to complain, but the world now takes Wikipedia very seriously and I'd rather have nothing at all than this sort of nastiness, which is absolutely unrepresentative of my person and my work. I'm a tough guy to write about -- one needs to be conversant in film ("a Day With Timmy Page"), music (my work in criticism, radio and record production), literature (I restored the novelist Dawn Powell to public attention), autism (I wrote about my struggles with Asperger Syndrome in "Parallel Play") and education to get a glimpse of my activity. I don't know if you have anybody who can do that -- maybe you should just remove me from the library. But I hope you will take this seriously, as I feel mangled by a huge and powerful organization that I mostly love and respect.

Sincerely,

Tim Page — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mitegap (talk • contribs) 13:22, 22 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Hi Mr Page -- thank you for your letter. I've read through the article and I completely agree, making a couple of cuts per WP:UNDUE.  I rather wish you'd left the untrimmed letter (available in the page history) because you made your points eloquently and well.  The article needs more material to flesh out the rest of your career -- I regret I don't have time at the moment to do the research -- but I hope a minor trim helps for now.  On one other note I do not believe that either of the editors you name intend to distort your career; one of the things that happens here is that biographies of living people tend to get edited in rough proportion with the 'interestingness' of press coverage, so juicy tidbits get written up at greater length than dry but factual coverage of many years of fine work.  We do it sometimes without even knowing we're on the wrong side of WP:UNDUE.  All the best, Antandrus  (talk) 22:33, 21 March 2015 (UTC)


 * And I will put the Barry information back. We do not censor embarrassing information at the request of a subject, and there is no rationale for doing so here. A Google search shows the Barry info fifth on the list, which is enough to justify inclusion (it's how I came across the info in the first place. Antandrus, you may mean well, but removing information because someone doesn't want it is not the way to build content: try adding material to the page rather than just deleting. - SchroCat (talk) 03:07, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

I no longer care about SchroCat's nonsense anymore. He's small potatoes -- if he thinks that is the most important thing about me, that's cool. If this was a 5000 word article, it would fit just fine; no objection to the mistakes I've made, for there have been many. But -- again -- it's like talking about Roman Polanski and pretending that he was mostly a child molester and never made CHINATOWN. (SchroCat might want to look up Polanski and learn something...)  Or look ME up, for that matter! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.134.70.79 (talk) 03:25, 22 March 2015 (UTC)


 * The articles cannot be censored at the request of the subject just because they are unhappy with something they have done or said in their past. The articles on here must be "warts and all", so long as a proper balance is maintained, as it is here. Jack1956 (talk) 09:00, 22 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I agree with Jack and others here. Wikipedia is, and should remain, uncensored. This incident has been widely reported on in the past and it is reliably cited in this article.  WP:IDONTLIKEIT springs immediately to mind here.   Cassianto Talk   09:14, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Two things about Page's most recent message above: First, his attack on Evancho's parents (comparing the 11-year-old Evancho to the very sad case of JonBenet Ramsay), in which he implied that Evancho's parents were exploiting her (he states: "I chose deliberately to make a point about what Evancho's handlers were doing to a talented child"), but in the article he admits that he did not do any fact checking about the matter, even though there was ample evidence in the public record that Evancho's parents strictly limit her career. The article was *not* the only one that he has written expressing his bias against careers for child artists. The instances that he cited where he favorably reviewed or profiled young artists concerned much older children and, irrelevantly, young adults. Note that I have no relationship or connection with Evancho or her parents and have never met any of them, although I have purchased two of her albums. I enjoy updating the Wikipedia pages about her. Page's e-mail from his Washington Post account sent to Marion Barry's aide speaks for itself and is presented neutrally, correctly cited, and essential to understanding the subject and his character. Again, Page is lying when he says that was the end of the matter -- it was referred to thereafter in other media and in interviews of Page. Second, as I noted above, the proper way to address balance in the article is to expand the other information about Page (citing reliable, independent sources), not to whitewash the article. Note that much of the information about Page in this article is copied from and cited to self-written sources. Page has spent a lot of time over the years trying to remove the embarrassing incidents from his bio and arguing and sending uncivil messages to editors on their Talk pages. He even vandalized my User page more than once. If he would, instead, send cites to reliable, third party articles about his own career, we could easily expand the information about his life and career to provide the balance that he says he seeks. -- Ssilvers (talk) 18:20, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Mr. Silvers -- Midori was 14 when I wrote the first feature about her. I consider your suggestion that I wrote negative reviews about many young artists vandalism of its own sort -- may I remind you that you called me a "thoughtless, nasty person" and many other things on the Evancho page? I have deliberately not said anything about Evancho's parents, although no child could be paraded in public without getting somebody's permission, no? You have taken a difference of opinion about one single, deeply controversial young artist and turned it into a crusade, in the pretense of objectivity. The Barry mention suggests that my departure from the Post had something to do with my angry response to the harassment I had been receiving from his minions, who then publicized the letter everywhere they could. Is paid publicity the criterion for importance in your mind, whether Barry or Evancho? Are Marion Barry and Jackie Evancho that much more important to my career than -- oh, say, my work with Glenn Gould, Virgil Thomson, Dawn Powell, Sigrid Undset, Robert Green Ingersoll, the record company I founded, the thousands of people I've reviewed and interviewed? Certainly, the article as it stands right now would suggest that. I'm only replying to this because I respect and admire Wikipedia, even though it includes people who seem to think that calling people "nasty," "thoughtless" liars is acceptable behavior. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mitegap (talk • contribs) 14:54, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Sorry, and you are?  Cassianto Talk   15:04, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

mistaken suggestion of cause and effect
Always startled that of all the millions of words I'm proud of, somebody invariably comes back to my intemperate irritation at former DC Mayor Barry!

This will have to do, I guess. I no longer attempt to correct most of the writing that is done about me. In fairness, however, I would ask that the suggestion that my leaving the Post had anything to do with my letter be clarified. I had been negotiating with the University of Southern California since mid-2006 and I had already given notice to the Post that I would be leaving several months before. This is probably a picayune point but in pursuit of a general understanding of what actually happened it seems to me something that should be addressed and corrected. I got hell from the Post -- rightly -- but I was already all but out the door at that point, as is mentioned in one of dear Deb Howell's articles on the incident (RIP).

Also, since the author seems to have a keen interest in my work, I would suggest that he might take a look at some other things that I've published since 2007. I'm especially proud of an article that was just published in The Wall Street Journal last July. https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-unlikely-refuge-in-the-year-of-covid-11627704061  There have also been several in the New York Review of Books and the Washington Post, as well as a decent article about me in the latest edition of the New Grove Dictionary of American Music. A lot more, but I can't think of them right now.

In any event, cheers!

Tim

TimPageWriter (talk) 20:09, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Out of curiosity, is there a reason that you now have a second Wikipedia account?&#32;-- Fyrael (talk) 20:06, 27 August 2021 (UTC)


 * An edit was made by the new account earlier today stating they'd forgotten the previous password. As their reply was intended to be private to another editor I won't provide a diff here. -- Longhair\talk 23:38, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

Link Removed
David Hoffman posted "A Day with Timmy Page" along with some commentary before and after to YouTube today (10/1/22). I added a link to it, but it was removed by XLinkBot because it "probably shouldn't have been included in Wikipedia." (A link to watch a movie mentioned in the article "shouldn't be on Wikipedia"?) I have neither the time nor the patience to deal with whatever process it takes to get it approved, but here's the link if someone else wants to deal with it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWVHbsQwylw Mwolfgang (talk) 19:32, 1 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Mwolfgang, Wikipedia does not allow external links embedded in the article text, which is why the bot reverted you. You are welcome to add the video to the "External links" section.  Aza24  (talk)   07:04, 2 October 2022 (UTC)