Talk:The Fly (opera)

Picture

What's the point of the picture of the fly on this article? It really doesn't add much to a reader's knowledge or understanding of the opera. AnturiaethwrTalk 02:40, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, fuckin' gross dude, take that shit off of there... Boredom Swells (talk) 06:10, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

PacificBoy / Michael Bednarek

On 15 June, User:PacificBoy made some edits, some of which I thought were a disimprovement; to wit:

1. "… commissioned by Paris' Théâtre du Châtelet" is awkward;
2. calling Shore composing the film score "coincidental" misses that it's unrelated to the opera;
3. changing the time reference for the lack of a recording from 2009 to 2011 seems unwarranted – a recording may well have been made since;
4. the phrasing "The opera runs approximately two hours." is sloppy;
5. the phrasing "… to a libretto…" is a stock phrase used in many similar articles; using "… with …" is non-standard and awkward.

I edited the article, keeping some of the previous edit's details and changing those outlined above. Further, on re-reading, the role of Baitzel seemed unclear to me, so I added a preposition to make his co-commissioning role clearer; I corrected the method of citing a Guardian and a NY Times article where I also added a Wikipedia link for its author, A. Tommasini.

All this was summarily reverted by PacificBoy after he left a message on my talk page, accusing me without justification of a "revert war and insults" and – in light of his own unqualified revert rather ironically – of "removing edits for the sake of removing them". I suggest to restore my edit. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:55, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

I definitely concur here. I have reverted PacificBoy's edits which were extremely unconstructive. Voceditenore (talk) 07:29, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

My copy edits were made in good faith, which you should have assumed. When you revert someone's changes without comment, you're starting a revert war. And yes, I found your post mortem rationale insulting rather than constructive. That said, I myself should not have simply reverted without an explanation of my own, and I should have kept the conversation here, where it belonged.

I would like to thank you for enlightening me on the phrase "to a libretto." While I have written extensively for the entertainment and cultural fields (see my comment below), this is a construction that I'd never used, and frankly wasn't used to seeing.

However, I'd like to address two of your above comments:

1) Updating "as of 2009" to "as of 2011" was done to keep the available information current. When one sees "as of 2009..." in 2011, the mind goes immediately to "well, what about since then?" It forces the reader to look elsewhere for developments, and as Wikipedia is a living entity, it's helpful to update something like that from time to time, which is all I did. I've changed this back to "As of 2011". I've also changed the cumbersome "there exists no recording," to simply "no recording of the opera has been released."

2) As someone who's written professionally in the entertainment field for more than 20 years, I assure you that "The opera runs..." is not "sloppy." "The opera runs for," however, most assuredly is. Operas, as with albums, TV shows and other media, have a "running time," and is often expressed in text as I'd changed it. Idiomatically, the correct phrase is "runs," not "runs for" (or "lasts," for that matter). Perhaps it's because it's an opera, and therefore culturally elevated, that you feel that this phrase is "sloppy."PacificBoy 05:28, 7 November 2011 (UTC)