Wagner was not defined by his anti-Semitism; he was defined by his music, which was universally humanist. To make his anti-Semitism out to be as important as his music is really really unbalanced. The version Ed had was fine. Noone today reads any of Wagners "anti-Semitic" works, but millions listen to his music with pleasure. It is appropriate that it be mentioned Wagner was anti-Semitic, but to devote more than a passing mention to it as if it was the man's raison d'etre for existing does a gross injustice to a man who is dead and unable to defend himself.
You should be thankful Ed was protecting the page; where Ed left in a whole paragraph on Wagners anti-Semitism, I wanted to reduce it to a single sentence. But I can live with Ed's version as an acceptable compromise.
Jonathan
On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 05:33:31PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
I'm not really asking for a chorus of opinions from the list, but an authoritative, once-and-for-all pronouncement from the Founders.
That's all nice and good, but before you do so, you should present an accurate and complete summary of the facts that made you pose this question.
- Since Clutch started an Edit War by unilaterally removing large parts of
the Richard Wagner article on the English Wikipedia (one of several edit wars he got involved in yesterday), that article has been edited back and forth.
- Specifically, it has been debated whether statements about Wagner's
anti-Semitism should be part of the article, or moved into a separate article because they "distract" from Wagner's work as Clutch argued. Unfortunately, so far, Clutch has succeeded in separating this part from the main article, even though we include dubious and extensive claims about anti-Semitism in the Noam Chomsky article.
- That Wagner was an anti-Semite has not seriously been disputed by anyone,
including Clutch. Wagner's publication "Das Judenthum in der Musik", where he accuses Jews of being hateful, greedy, powerful and heartless matches any reasonable definition of anti-Semitism perfectly.
- Ed has repeatedly used his administrative powers to protect the page in
an attempt to prevent edit conflicts. At first, I had no problem with that, but now he is getting involved in the debate and locking the page from further edits to protect his version at the same time.
- Ed holds the position that, even if nobody disagrees with the fact that
Wagner was an anti-Semite, it should be attributed, even if the attribution is something as fishy as "is universally regarded as".
- I have countered this position with the analogy of requiring similar
attribution for statements like "Wagner attended university at ..".
The point here is, if there is no disagreement about facts among people whose opinions are verifiable and should be included in the article, I see no point in attributing any claims, regardless of the nature of the statement. As someone (Jimbo?) pointed out in the North Korea example, if North Korea actually disputes the numbers, that's a verifiable fact. If somebody, say, disputed the authenticity of Wagner's publication, that would be a verifiable fact. In these cases, we would clearly have to tone down the claims. But if there are no counter-opinions, why should we?
Furthermore, I consider Ed's use of his administrative privileges to protect articles he is involved in an abuse of said privileges. He should only use them in the way he initially did, as a "time out" to direct discussions in case of conflicts to the talk page, but he should not even do that if he states a position in the matter. Otherwise he is no longer a sysop or a moderator but an editor, which is not the function assigned to him. If I recall correctly, this is not the first time this has come up, so I think some kind of reaction is in order.