I happened upon this discussion of reverting the Köchel Catalog (the numerical listing of Mozart's complete works) back into the "List of complete works by Mozart" or something like that...

The same editor then goes to the talkpage of a fairly unremarkable Mozart work and asks the musical question "Is this notable"?

He's got a point there....and I've got my own POV in this question.

However, framing this in therms of Wikipedia, is he right or wrong here? What do people think?

I'd be interested in hearing people's reactions to this....

Notable is a somewhat meaningless word on WP. The best definition they can come up with is something with lots of published cites, but you can find that on anything by Mozart, just as you can on anything at all produced by Shakespeare or Einstein or Ben Franklin. Their laundry and shoppings lists are notable, or would be in cases where we had them. Come on.

My personal opinion sometimes approaches Abbey's: Mozart wrote 40 symphonies while trying to get a perfect one, and then finally he wrote a perfect one. So much for the symphonies. But I'm a philistine in this area and admit it. I will leave the criticism to those whose specialty this is. And I'm an inclusionist, remember. Detailed discussion of the Ralph Vaughn Williams #5 (is it really like looking at a cow for 45 minutes?) doesn't take space away from (say) discussion of the Mahler #2 and what Bernstein did with it over the years. And so on.

In discussing the amoung of space devoted to an article of this sort, it is helpful to keep things in perspective by comparing the amount of space devoted to things like articles on individual rock tunes.

My opinion from the viewpoint of within WP is yes, it is notable; as a work by such a significant figure, it's of interest and potentially useful to cover every work. (Stasis is data; for a figure like Mozart, even "his early work has little to say about it" is a point of potential use to a reader). Where Wikipedia does beat Britannica is that it can cover every Shakespeare sonnet, every Pink Floyd album, every episode of the Simpsons. If you'll forgive a burst of Wikilawyering, WP:N is an essay and has a large "this is only a guideline, use common sense" at the top; as I understand it, Jimbo & Larry's original vision was that verifiability would be the inclusion guideline. Yes, it means a load of Pokemon and Star Trek articles, but so what? They're not hurting anyone and they're potentially useful to someone. (Cue Jon with an explanation of why I'm wrong…)

I personally feel that every work of Mozart should be discussed within WP, but do not feel that this particular work (15 measures of unremarkable music, probably notated by his father anyway...) should have its own article. The idea of merging it into the Nannerl Notenbuch article seems a sensible and well considered solution.

The Köchel article is also kind of a gray area for me: definitely, the Köchel catalog and Köchel's work itself are notable....but does the catalog deserve an article outside of the Mozart and Köchel articles themselves?

I am tending on thinking that this is, indeed, probably overkill....but since there are articles about just about every pop song ever written, it does seem not only fair, but also necessary to keep these articles to "counterbalance" the lists of Britney Spears singles etc.

The poor fool who brought this stuff up is obviously headed for a community ban...but how does this discussion show us the current state of the inclusionist/deletionist thing? Are lines being blurred? Or does this indicate that lines are being drawn, but everything within those lines is "fair game"?

I always liked #38 (Prague) the best. But, then, I'm a fan of Yes, too. And the Detroit Lions. Don't mind me.

I misread (or misunderstood) what you were asking; I thought you were asking if it should be covered at all. I agree that merging is the way to go.

The example I generally use of "good merging" is A1 road; this takes a bunch of stubby articles on roads and buildings that would each be of little use on their own, but by knitting them together one can see the changing architectural styles, the differing characters of the areas, how the roads knit together to form a single major artery, how and why urban development spread over time, and so on.

Unfortunately, this approach only really works when all the sections have at least a just-adequate stub to merge, otherwise one is left with a patchy looking article with empty or almost-empty sections (see this early version of [[A215 road]], for example).

Mozart woulda been a "Yes" fan too...as a matter of fact, he probably would have wanted to play in "Yes"....



Yup, having a short, three-phrase article about 15 measures of music is probably not a very effective way of building an encyclopedia. Unfortunately, if the people doing the merging don't understand the importance of what's being merged, the end result might be more confusing, not less....but even a composer as notable as Mozart should not have articles about all aspects of his work....Unless it's a "Mozart" Encyclopedia.

Sure, but all his work should be covered in there somewhere, since it's a factor in how his later style came to be. Child is father of the man, and all that. On some subjects, yes I agree the merge would be complicated, but I refuse to believe there's not a single person there without the specialist knowledge to do this particular merge.

(To pre-empt Awbrey – yes, I know this is a discussion that would be better on WP itself, but TFA can't participate there for obvious reasons).

The problem as I see it seems to be that one person seems to be playing the role of the squeaky wheel...and the people applying the grease are perhaps not doing so because they have any knowledge of Mozart, but because they want the wheel to stop squeaking. It seems like panic mode to me. Hopefully, a Mozart expert will have a look at this business and try to figure out a good solution. Right now, it looks an awful lot like "hit or miss".....

You know, I'm not technically banned on WP, in spite of what "Signor Moreschi" would have you believe.. I maintain that the Gretab account was not violating that arbcom ruling because nothing that I did affected any "products" that I publish and the arbcom ruling was aimed toward that kind of COI, not simply being the World's expert on a certain subject...but I'm not terribly excited about going on WP right now, with all of the stalkers that follow me around the web who come from that site...and since Knol seems to like me better (having put me on their front page and all...), it doesn't seem like something that I really need to be doing anyway....

Well, again, from Milton's rules of writing: the more likely the reader is to want to know something, the more immediately accessible it should be. That helps with putting things into parens vs. footnotes, footnotes vs. endnotes, and stuff like that.

In Wikipedia the problem is hard because we have no targetted reader we're writing for. So there's no real way to MAKE this decission. That's a conundrum I don't think something that aims to be an "encyclopedia of all human knowledge" is ever going to get away from.

The best you can do is fix it so that the reader can rapidly identify for himself what his level of interest in detail and expertise, is, and then (after that) read more or less easily and seamlesslessly about a subject, having to thereafter make the least number of "skip down the page" or "pause to read hyperlink" digressions possible.

Yeah, I know that's a crazily impossible goal. After all-- the readers' interests and level of expertise may change even while he/she is in the very act of reading.....

But okay, given the goal as simply a unreachable target, like spiritual perfection, you can see how you might write these Mozart thingies. It may involve a lot of duplication and summation of material, but that's okay, because the necessity of covering the same info, often with some duplication, IN THE SAME WORK is implicit. If you assume the work is for the benefit of many, many levels of audience (different audiences). Thus, a decent encyclopedia should have BOTH a separate Wiki on this little bit, AND a shorter digression on it in context with M. juvenilia or whatever, AND a briefer mention of it in a catalog also, AND a mention in other ways of analyzing Mozart's work. All of which should come up to anybody reading at a given level of interest and knowledge, in a way which doesn't cause them to stop and say: "Whoa, more than I wanted to know... gunna skip down some paragraph here...." OR, "Wait, I need to know more, and I guess I have to click a link. Now where's that link...?"