Talk:Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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	Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is a former featured article. Please see the links under Article milestones below for its original nomination page (for older articles, check the nomination archive) and why it was removed.
	This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on February 22, 2004.
Article milestones Date Process Result January 19, 2004 Refreshing brilliant prose Kept October 20, 2004 Featured article review Kept October 29, 2005 Featured article review Demoted February 21, 2007 Good article nominee Not listed Current Status: Former featured article

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Contents 1 Choosing which source to cite 2 More citation problems 3 Auto-bibliography software is not ready for prime time 4 Smallpox 5 Removing Project 6 Image sizes

[edit] Choosing which source to cite

Hello, thanks to Gary King for rationalizing the footnotes, etc. There are some places where he switched the citation from some other source to Solomon's biography. The particular one I have in mind here is switching from Deutsch to Solomon re. what Mozart called himself.

I've switched this one back (and plan to do a few more as I have time). In the present case, there are two reasons.

• First, Deutsch makes this as a direct declaration, based on his study of the documents. I think that for this particular claim, Deutsch is a more direct and trustable source.
• More generally, I don't see any merit in cutting down on the diversity of sources cited. Rather, in any given case, we should go with the most detailed, trustable source available. Sincerely, Opus33 (talk) 17:50, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Feel free to cite more than one source for the same fact. Nothing wrong with that either. It happens all the time in the literature and with footnotes, the extra citation is not that obtrusive. DavidRF (talk) 04:30, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Good point.

So, I went back to the citation of Solomon (1995) that I had removed, to check out the case at hand--might Solomon serve as a good backup for Deutsch? Unfortunately, the Solomon reference says nothing about what Mozart called himself in general and thus is not an appropriate citation here. I suspect now that the editor who did these changes may not have read the sources and that quite a bit of work might be needed to fix the damage. Opus33 (talk) 15:50, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] More citation problems

Concerning whether Mozart's output declined during the late 1780's: Steptoe actually provides data (counting the works). The Solomon reference does not; it should not have been substituted. Opus33 (talk) 17:17, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Auto-bibliography software is not ready for prime time

A previous edit implemented a system in which the bibliography entries are entered as fields and auto-converted to a format displayed on the page. I have converted the bibliography back to text because of what I take to be serious flaws in this software:

• It permits editors to link the reader to particular bookseller. In this case, the editor in question consistently picked the Amazon web site. I definitely think we should not be endorsing one bookseller over another. (A further note: this problem was fixed years ago when the software was set up so that when the reader clicks on the ISBN number, (s)he is directed to a large, commercially-neutral set of options. The newer code re-introduces the old problem.)
• The current auto-bibliography formats the entries in a nonstandard and reader-unfriendly way. The purpose of the Author (Date) format is to make it easy to find a reference by using your eyes to scan the page for a simple, compact formula. The actual month and day of publication are trivia and make it harder for the reader to find the reference (s)he is looking for. To my knowledge, no professional scholarly outlet formats its bibliographies this way.

If someone ever bothers to clean up the bibliography-creating software to fix these problems, I think it would be fine to use it. Opus33 (talk) 16:04, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Smallpox

Hello, I'm starting to read Ruth Halliwell's incredibly detailed book The Mozart Family, which includes informative material on Mozart and smallpox. Until 1796, with Edward Jenner's work, smallpox vaccination used an attenuated form of the human smallpox virus. This was very dangerous and sometimes caused the patient actually to die of smallpox. So vaccination was a very hard decision for the parents, Mozart's included. The simplistic sentence we had before, which makes Leopold appear like an ignorant, child-neglecting religious fundamentalist, doesn't really conveying the proper sense of the issue and I've taken it out.

I think sooner or latter the question of Mozart and smallpox vaccination should be discussed, but probably in a satellite article of some sort and not the main article. Opus33 (talk) 23:42, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Removing Project

I am removing Project:Freemasonry from the article... according to that project's stated scope, it deals with articles about the organization, not for individuals who were Freemasons. If this is a problem, please discuss at the Project talk page. Blueboar (talk) 03:29, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Image sizes

A while ago someone removed all designations of image size, so that they all come out default width. I'm restoring the "hard" widths in a number of cases, specifically, in cases when the default width produced an illegible image.

I'm aware that in principle, users can set image size using the Wikipedia's software. However, I'm also convinced that this is a poor way to handle image sizes. The great majority of our readers have no idea that you can do this (think of your mother, if that helps), and so we serve them better by specifying sensible image sizes in the article itself. Please note that the policy page for images does permit editors to do this. Opus33 (talk) 22:43, 3 June 2008 (UTC)