Talk:Wiedersehen

Undue reversions / meaning of "Wiedersehen" [20191020]

Last night I made a series of edits on several pages related to the Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul universe, and (as usual ?) almost all of them were quickly reverted with no explanation whatsoever ("Wiedersehen" / "Winner" / "Pimento" / "List of BB & BCS characters"). When I reverted some of those reversions, they were re-reverted (a split second later !), with a blanket comment about "extraneous details". But who decides which details are integral and which are extraneous ? It could be argued that having dedicated articles for each episode of a TV series is already way extraneous. A plot summary should be either very short (2-3 sentences) and merely provide the basic elements of the storyline, or it should stand on its own and provide enough detail to make sense for someone who hasn't seen the episode in question, and knows virtually nothing about the characters, their motivations and prior interactions. Most of the time the plot summaries I find on Wikipedia are somewhere in between, too long for quick reference, and missing important details to actually make sense as standalone recaps, so one has to wonder what their purpose is. I simply added details which I felt were missing, or some extra connective words or punctuation to make it "flow" better — or in some cases I corrected information which was just plain wrong. For instance "Wiedersehen" in the context of this episode doesn't mean "See you again", which is a rough literal translation; it definitely means "Goodbye", as explained later in the article. And the interpretation by which that word foreshadows Werner's death is certainly valid — I know, for such a statement a reliable source should be provided (I would need to search among the rare articles recapping the whole season since most reviews for that episode were made right after its initial broadcast, hence with no knowledge of upcoming events). But the same could be said about the name Juan Bolsa supposedly being a nod to The Sopranos' Johnny Sack, a statement which is not sourced in the article on BB/BCS characters and for which I added a "citation needed" tag, which disappeared following that reversion. (By the way, I made three series of edits on that article, I'm wondering why the other two were preserved if everything I contribute is so "extraneous".) Also, I duly noted that I made a typo when writing "Sleepin' Jimmy" (stupid really as I checked the exact wording on a subtitle file right before I typed it — must have been my subconscious urging me to go the f##k to sleep), but what about "Brock Cantillol", which I corrected ("Cantillo") and which reappeared following that reversion ? It's seriously frustrating. Wikipedia is supposed to be a collaborative work, each (good faith) edit being a step toward global improvement; even if one particular edit is not perfect, it still brings something to the table, and the minimal courtesy before bluntly deleting a work which sometimes took hours is to consider every contribution on its own right, and ponder why someone made the effort to make it, and in the cases where it does improve ever-so-slightly what was there before (which I definitely think is true here), even if there's a typo or a clumsy wording somewhere (not all contributors are native speakers), keep what's relevant, polish it if necessary, and find a way to "make room" for it. Granted, it takes more effort than just hitting the "Undo" button, but I'd argue that it's worth it in the long run — if the cosmic powers-that-be had reverted every single "extraneous" evolution since life appeared on Earth it wouldn't have evolved much beyond the vegetal (but according to Emil Cioran, who wrote that "the Sun should have frown at the advent of the first insect and fled at the irruption of the first chimpanzee", it would have been for the best, and something in me tends to agree with him, considering how flawed and nefarious we are as a species... we're all "chimpanzees with machine guns" in a way ! but I digress).--Abolibibelot (talk) 12:19, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

@Abolibibelot: Please see the comments in the article under the "production" heading. The literal meaning of "wiedersehen" is "meet again" or "see again". Auf Wiedersehen is used as a farewell greeting in German -- "We'll meet again" or "We'll see each other again" -- the same way as "goodbye" in English.

Billmckern (talk) 12:30, 20 October 2019 (UTC)