Talk:Idomeneo (film)

Problems with this article

There are a couple of problems with this article.

Most of the background and synopsis sections duplicate the content of the main Wikipedia article on Mozart's opera Idomeneo — which this article does not even link to. Any film of this opera would have this same background and synopsis.

All of the substantive content is the work of one editor, and much of the Critical Reception section appears to be that editor's own opinion. Although sources are provided, many of the specific comments are opinionated and not clearly supported by any particular source, e.g., "Whatever one thought of Ponnelle's contribution to the evening, he allowed his singers to communicate the profound feelings latent in Mozart's music."

Marc Shepherd (talk) 14:41, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

I'd like to thank everyone who has taken an interest in this article, and to apologize for not contributing to its Talk page sooner.

I'm anything but an expert in Wikipedia's protocols, so I wouldn't be surprised if I've offended against some of them, for which, again, I'd like to apologize. I thought that it might be helpful if I explained why I wrote the article in the way that I did, less in the spirit of an accused pleading his innocence than as an attorney offering a plea in mitigation.

I called the article "Idomeneo (Luciano Pavarotti film)" because I thought that I might thereby help some of Pavarotti's fans to discover a film of his of which they might otherwise be unaware, and it does indeed seem to be the case that following its retitling, the article has been viewed much less often than before. I did include a link to Idomeneo - the title of the opera in my DVD chapter listing has always been bold and blue. My Background section includes some of the same material as Idomeneo's, but most of it is new; I'd say that it complements the earlier article more than it plagiarizes it. The material in it is entirely derived from the scholarly sources cited, and is not, alas, anything for which I can claim credit as an original researcher. My Synopsis, it is true, parallels the earlier article's quite closely, but I thought that some readers might prefer a slightly more colourful telling of the story of the opera than my predecessors provided. All of the opinions of the film expressed in my Critical Reception section are those of the cited journalists; the comments which are not enclosed in quotation marks are paraphrases of what they wrote in their reviews - I feared that reproducing long direct excerpts from their journalism might violate Wikipedia's rules about copyright. To the best of my recollection, I've never expressed a critical opinion of my own in any Wikipedia article.

I have the deepest respect for those Wikipedia editors who specialize in classical music or opera, and I'm sure that almost all of them know far more about these topics than I do. Articles about television recordings of theatrical stagings of operas aren't that numerous, and I wrote this one very much as an experiment: my subtext was "This is the kind of thing that I'd like as a reader: how about you?" If anyone would like to amend what I offered, I'd be more than happy to see it improved.

Niggle1892 (talk) 09:29, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

I agree with Niggle1892 that the top banner {{Original research}} is unwarranted. The reviews are sourced and their rephrasing seems fair, although the "Critical reception" section in total is probably too long. However, I also agree with Marc Shepherd that large parts of "Background" and all of "Synopsis" are probably better incorporated into the opera's article. As for page views: they have always been miniscule, apart from a moderate peak at the end of March 2021. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 12:26, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

Michael is as fair (and kind) as always. I can't deny that my Critical Reception section goes on a bit. When I first began writing about classical albums for Wikipedia, I didn't include anything about their reviews at all, but as the years have gone by, I've found what the critics had to say more and more interesting. Reporting their views at length at least minimizes the risk of misrepresentation that arises when one offers readers no more than a summary of them.

As regards my Background and Synopsis sections, I could indeed have revised Idomeneo's instead of creating my own, but I'm reluctant to do anything too violent to an article unless it's one that I initiated, and I thought that a degree of overlapping between the old article and my new one might be tolerable. Messiah Part I, Messiah Part II and Messiah Part III are excellent articles but share slabs of text that have obviously been cut and pasted, which isn't something that I've allowed myself to do..

On the pageviews question, it's true that this article has never been wildly popular, but its renaming has reduced the count of visitors from a tiny number to another tinier still - around a third of what it used to be. It amuses me that of Wikipedia's twenty articles about recordings of classical operas, there are only three not created by me - Ernani (1903 HMV recording), Otello (Toscanini recording) and Tosca (1953 EMI recording) - and that these have all been spared being renamed in accordance with the MOS's recommendations, despite having worn their current titles for ages. I think that the MOS, like the Bible, is perhaps better used as a good source of advice than as an infallible revelation. Niggle1892 (talk) 12:01, 22 May 2021 (UTC)