Talk:University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

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Removal of text regarding financial difficulties in the 19th century

I will begin with a technical point, unrelated the actual issue.

This concerns edits that have only been made by myself (...Atavi) and User:Bratschist. Thus, it is initially intended to be addressed to Bratschist, but I am very interested to have this being readable and read by other people as well, primarily because I may not follow this up in any meaningful time frame and secondly because I am unsure whether Bratschist will have read this any time since they are not a regular contributor either. I already am referring to Bratschist in the third person and will continue to do so, primarily because I don't want to worry about changing back and forth between second and third person, as my train of thought changes form. I will also be writing in a level of detail that will only be benefiting other editors, since Bratschist and myself are obviously aware of the fundamentals here. Obviously this is a dispute over the inclusion of content, which in the context of Wikipedia:Edit warring#The_three-revert_rule has one "revert" from each of us (or at least I think so, as I'm not sure how the reversions are counted). Aside from the fact that we only have one revert each, the edits have all been a couple of months from each other, rather than within 24 hours (I actually didn't know the 24h time frame, since I had only read "three revert" and not the whole guideline). In any event, regardless of whether there is the possibility of violation of this or any other rule/guideline, this is obviously an issue warranting discussion. I am not really claiming this is an "important" issue by any measure, only that I'm not inclined to make further edits without some sort of discussion first. But I do have the view of following this through to some sort of conclusion, even at a slow pace.

So, for the benefit of others, a quick summary of the succession of edits is that Bratschist removed some text, which I re-inserted a while later and then Bratschist removed it again along with a larger portion of text around it. I must note that the text Bratschist removed had been written by me in this edit. However, I can assure everyone and anyone that I am not "protecting" the text I wrote, feeling an "ownership" of the article.

In an edit at 2010-09-02T19:29:39 and another shortly after that Bratschist removed text, which mainly is about financial difficulties the university's precursor institution (usually referred to as the "Vienna Conservatory") faced from its establishment in 1817 until 1851. Three sentences were removed. They were:

It was meant to be modeled on the Paris Conservatory, but, due to a lack of funds, it began solely as a singing school.

The conservatory's finances were very unstable.

Tuition fees were introduced in 1829, but by 1837 the institution was bankrupt.

Then, in an edit at 2010-12-11T02:48:11, I reinserted the two sentences.

Finally, in an edit at 2011-02-18T02:26:23, Bratschist removed again the first sentence and removed most of the paragraph containing the second sentence, including the third, although the 2nd sentence itself was not removed, but slightly modified in order to connect it to the rest of the paragraph, thus:

Due to financial instabilites between, by imperial resolution, the school was nationalized [...]

In the edit summary of his second edit Bratschist referred to the information removed as "irrelevant and redundant".

I really cannot see how this is in any way irrelevant (to the article's subject or something other) or redundant or any other similar adjective. The information refers to important historical information about the Vienna Conservatory, including the institution which was intended to be the model for it and significant financial tribulations most intense from 1829 to 1851. In fact I fail to see how the following sentence, which I also wrote, is in any way more significant than the sentences that have been deleted:

Joseph Hellmesberger, Sr. was director from 1851 to 1893.

In addition the sentence "Due to financial instabilites between, by imperial resolution, the school was nationalized" as it stands now is inaccurate, since one of the reasons for the financial instability of the school was the discontinuation of state funding in 1848 and the school was only nationalized in 1909 for reasons that had very little to do with the financial instability 50 years earlier. This inaccuracy could easily be removed in other ways, but I repeat that I find no reason for the information in question to have been deleted.

Closing, I should note that there is a heavy imbalance from between the length of the text on the University today and that about the University's history. But this can't possibly be resolved by axing the history section, only through expanding the "present" section.

I urge you Bratschist to reconsider yourself why the information excluded should remain so and also for you and any editor to expand the article in a meaningful way. As for myself the focus from the very start had been on the past since the Vienna Conservatory with which so many 19th century musicians were associated did not seem to exist according to Wikipedia and it was not easy to immediately find the correspondence with what everyone calls the Vienna Conservatory, but in fact does not seem to have ever had that name.

--Atavi 05:30, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

I have now re-inserted the text in its entirety. Whether someone has a different opinion time will tell. --Atavi (talk) 19:19, 2 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]