User talk:Penfield

Gilbert and Sullivan
No offense, Penfield, but please discuss your intended changes on the talk pages before you make big changes. These G&S-related entries have been edited by a number of people, and it is better to discuss first. I disagree with you about some of your changes, including the Popeye/Pirate king deletion (there is only one note's difference, and this was discussed a while ago among the contributors). Also, if you are going to add quotes from books, please add the page number where the quote appears. I believe that the Caryl Brahms book is a disfavored reference, and that people agree that it is filled with inaccuracies and myths. Thanks for being enthusiastic -- I don't want to discourage your input, and I'm sure you have a lot to contrubute -- but Marc Shepherd and several of the contributors to these pages are experts and would be happy to vet your ideas before you change things. Thanks for your patience--sometimes a collaboration moves slower than one person would like. -- Ssilvers 03:05, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

By the way, one way to deal with something that you think should be deleted is to copy the language to the entry's discussion page that you think ought to be deleted and see if people agree or disagree. Thanks, -- Ssilvers 03:28, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Excuse me, Ssilvers, I appreciate the comments. I'm working on fixing them. I'll get back to you.

Ok, I've removed the Brahms quote, I agree she's not great source material. My issue is that in other cases, where I know what's correct, say because I knew the person, my entry was squashed for not having a quotation.

I can take it that if there's no discussion page for a topic, then it may be ok to make changes w/o discussion?


 * Hi. Wikipedia has a policy against "original research", so you really always need a citable source, even if you have observed a fact yourself.  That's encyclopedia style.   As to discussion pages, every entry has a discussion page.  yours might be the first posting to it.   In your paragraph on the Gondoliers page:  "This opera took longer to write than earlier ones."  Do you have a cite for that?  Is it important?  THen you say, Striving for an equal partnership with Gilbert, Sullivan was able to make music more dominant -- only 14 of the 47 pages of the original libretto are dialog.

1. How does this compare with others? 2. I think most people would agree that the words and music were co-equal, which is a remarkable thing about G&S. Sullivan, however, may have believed that he music should be dominant, rather than equal -- is that what you meant? You really need cites for all the assertions in this paragraph. Also the speed of the music should not affect its dominance or how many pages in the libretto are taken up by dialogue. Sorry to nitpick, but this paragraph seems dubious to me.


 * One more thing, facts about actors should go on those actors' pages, not on the pages about the operas.  You'll see that the way these entries are organized is that the G&S page has stuff about the collaboration.  Stuff about G OR S is on their individual pages, stuff about the operas are on those pages, and stuff about the actors are on their pages.  The reason for that is to minimize the amount of overlap and unnecessary duplication on Wiki.  If you have the same info in three places, and someone makes a change to one of them, and someone makes a different change to another one, now you have three disagreeing articles about the same thing.  Best regards, Ssilvers 03:57, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Here's another idea: You sound like a G&S fan.  You might want to join Savoynet, the international G&S discussion list, where you can talk to 700 G&S fans about G&S.  See http://www.cris.com/%7Eoakapple/savoynet/  -- Ssilvers 04:22, 28 June 2006 (UTC)