Talk:Clavier-Übung III

Recent edits

User:WillisBodine (WB) is a relatively new wikipedia editor. Their recent edits on this article do not seem to conform the usual way of changing content. That is by wp:consensus as well as careful use of reliable sources. Fortunately there are extensive sources for this article, particularly the two editions of Peter Williams (who died in 2015 2016). The two highly readable books of David Yearsley are also valuable sources; unlike Williams, he does not seek to be encyclopedic. There's also the classic text of Spitta, used in the WP article only for historical quotations from the English translation, not as a secondary source. The three most recent edits of WB have resulted in unstable changes which fail WP:V in the sources.

1. First they add their own personal commentary, which cannot be traced to either of from Williams two books.[1] The first edition from 1980 is available as a searchable source on archive.org (I own the physical book, bought in the CUP shop with a reduction as a faculty member). Similarly I own the physical book of the 2nd edition; it can also be found online as a pdf ebook or online on CUP. I find it very hard to match up WB's commentary to what the material of Williams, which is extremely detailed and scholarly.
2. The next edit of WB undoes their previous formulation and changes the format of the opening sentence of the lede of the article.[2] The article and its lede are extremely stable: there is no rational reason to change German Organ Mass to German Organ Mass. In the other edits, WB seems to have been unable to make up their own mind. They uses "missa brevis" instead of "mass", without carefully checking what Williams writes. In addition, Williams uses "communion" instead of "eucharist", but that's a very minor point.
3. They have used their personal views to insert [Roman Catholic] into a direct quotation from Spitta.[3] This is in English translation of Spitta's classic text on JS Bach. Changes like that are hard to justify and hamper the goal of this encyclopedia. On their user talk page, they have not provided convincing arguments for "annotating" the English translation.

In summary, WB's suggested edits are not helpful because they do not match up with the sources. Changing the first few words of the lede and adding bold wikilinks to sub-headers is somewhat WP:POINTY given the stability of the article. Almost of all the content was created in 2010, which is why new material from Yearsley's 2012 "Bach's Feet" was updated (for BWV 680). Mathsci (talk) 13:08, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Is this then the correct place for discussion? If so, then here is the basic fact: in several of his comments about BWV 680, Peter Williams is wrong (wherever Mathsci may have bought the copy...). An obsessive reliance on this secondary source has led him [them?] to re-edit my corrections, thus to perpetuate these errors in wiki. As I wrote to Mathsci (with no reply), I will not begin a series of warring edits. How shall we address this problem together? WillisBodine (talk) 17:56, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

The administrator User:Johnuniq already explained wikipedia policy at User talk:WillisBodine. On wikipedia, the "bell" icon alerts users every time another user sends an email message with the software "Email this user". I have noticed two such alerts as a result of off-wiki messages from WillisBodine. As Johnuniq has explained, discussions about mainspace articles happen on wikipedia ("on-wiki") on the relevant article talk pages. In order to write content, a potential editor finds sentences or paragraphs from reliable sources and then summarises them, in non-technical language if possible (that applies for the many Bach cantatas for example). Inline citations (if possible with page numbers) are made to justify the new sentences, using the standard format <ref>, </ref>, harvnb, etc. (There are other citation methods.)

Above there is the bold statement Peter Williams is wrong, written by WillisBodine. Peter Williams is an acknowledged expert on Bach, including his keyboard music and life. Writing that Peter Williams is wrong is fairly problematic as far as editing of mainspace wikipedia is concerned.

Please keep all discussions on-wiki, just as other wikipedia users do. Mathsci (talk) 19:31, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

@WillisBodine: Please examine WP:TP to see how comments are indented. In brief, insert an extra colon at the beginning of your comment when replying to someone (one more colon than they used). Wikipedia is a strange place: information must be verifiable (WP:V). That means even if future scholars were to uncover documentation proving you were correct, you still should not insert views that are unverifiable today. There's no rush here so I'll defer investigating further at the moment but I suggest a consideration of only one point that is in the article at the moment in order to focus the discussion. The article will conform to what the best sources say. Johnuniq (talk) 23:03, 9 November 2021 (UTC)