Template:Did you know nominations/Otto Schwarz (bandleader)


 * Thank you, RoySmith. As you know, one of the WP guidelines is that guidelines should be used with commonsense. In this case, we have a situation where our old war propaganda showed enmity and fear between civilian Brits and Germans during World War I, and that representation over-simplifies our view of that history. For this biographical subject, the situation was not as straightforward as that. The German band needed to be protected from performing on the street during the war, in case of British civilian abuse. On the other hand, there were many civilians in Harrogate who were saddened by the situation that their local bandsmen found themselves in. This might be unexpected by our own generations, and the long paragraph makes that multi-faceted situation clear in detail. I don't believe that it can be shortened, because we would then lose the emotional content of the paragraph, which is the bit that counts. That is why it has been quoted at length. To break up the paragraph would put the reader at a distance, unable to empathise with Schwarz and his contemporaries. The journalism of those times in most mainstream newspapers was intelligent, careful and responsible (unlike some tabloids etc. of today) and the paragraph has been balanced with great care. I believe that we would lose more than we would gain by cutting it and breaking it up. To put it another way, to cut it and break it up would be to editorialise it, and we don't want to do that. Storye book (talk) 15:54, 28 April 2023 (UTC)