Talk:The Lost Chord

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject Gilbert and Sullivan, an attempt to complete and improve the Gilbert and Sullivan related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
B This article has been rated as B-Class on the quality scale.
Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale for the G&S Project.

Article Grading:
The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

[edit] Unencyclopedic

As noted at What Wikipedia is not, Wikipedia is not:

Mere collections of public domain or other source material such as entire books or source code, original historical documents, letters, laws, proclamations, and other source material that are only useful when presented with their original, un-modified wording. Complete copies of primary sources (including mathematical tables, astronomical tables, or source code) should go into Wikisource.

An article that just quotes a poem is not encyclopedic. "The Lost Chord" should not have its own article unless there is something more to say about it than merely quoting its text.

By the way, I think it might be possible to write such an article about this song, but as it stands the article is unencyclopedic. Marc Shepherd 07:52, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Ow, ow! The pink tag is hurting my eyes!! I wrote something. Can we take the tag off now?Ssilvers 17:13, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Plenty of content here now, so {{unencyclopedic}} has been removed.

If the intention is not to have the poem in a separate article, then why does the article on Adelaide Anne Procter have specialized links to cited poems such as Cleansing Fires that, when clicked, bring up an edit page called "Editing Cleansing Fires"? Links that bring up an editor to add content which is not considered desirable are confusing links and should not exist in the first place. Should those links be removed from the original article? JohnD39 16:32, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

You're right. I have removed them.
In general, Wikipedia is not the place for the text of literary works. We have Wikisource for that. I believe it is considered acceptable to quote the source of a short poem, when there is something more substantial to say about it—as there is for "The Lost Chord." Comparable examples include the Major-General's Song and The Vicar of Bray. Those redlinks in the Procter article were not likely ever to generate acceptable articles in their own right, so I've removed them. Marc Shepherd 16:43, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fred Sullivan and relevance

The current edit says:

Several of the operas that Sullivan had written up to that time, and nearly all his other music for theatre was for works in which Fred was engaged as an actor, so it can be supposed that Sullivan was close to his brother, and went out of his way to help his theatrical career.

As far as I know, the only works by Arthur Sullivan in which Fred Sullivan appeared as an actor — were operas. At the time of Fred's death, Sullivan's only other theatrical works were a ballet and four sets of incidental music to plays by Shakespeare. Was Fred Sullivan a dancer or a Shakespearean actor? Not to my knowledge.

Perhaps the whole Fred Sullivan paragraph should be shortened. Apparently the idea is to show that Sullivan was close to his brother, but it can generally be assumed that the loss of a brother at such a young age would be invariably tragic, even if the brother had had no theatrical career. Marc Shepherd 21:29, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I took out the stuff on the other plays on July 10. -- Ssilvers 17:59, 13 July 2006 (UTC)