Late Spring Wikipedia Article Under Attack!

After eight months’ solid work on the Wikipedia page for Ozu’s Late Spring (Film Club – August 2011), just when I’m about to add the photos and then “unveil” it for comments and feedback, the page is being brutally attacked by vandals. Two of them have tried to erase everything but the lead paragraphs, the plot and the home video section, and a third tried to erase the entire “Biographical and historical background” section. I’ve managed to undo all their changes, but I’m running out of patience.

Please stop by the page and give me your feedback, particularly those of you who commented on the film (and on my comments on it) when it was in the film club. Do you think this is a page worth defending?

It is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Spring. Thanks.

Hi Dylan expert

I don’t understand how Wikipedia works regarding writing articles , editing them and how someone can just erase them ? but I just took a look and I think it looks like an good comprehensive entry to me . I left some 5 star ratings ( not sure if that’s what you meant by feedback , plus I don’t have any kind of account?) Anyway , personally I love Ozu’s films and Late Spring certainly is deserving of a decent write up.

Being an obsessive collector of Japanese films on DVD and Blu-ray I liked the section describing it’s home video release history , Criterion have it coming on Blu-ray soon too.

cheers

Longstone

Sorry to hear about this, Dylanexpert. I think that Wikipedia has some a forum where you can report this kind of activity and have moderators take a look at the situation.

Its a bit bizarre that someone would want to vandalise a page like that – am I reading the history right that it is just one individual who seems to have a problem with what you wrote? That ‘term paper’ comment is just idiotic.

I think I mentioned it before but I have a bit of a gripe with wikipedia as I’ve been permanently banned from commenting! My mistake for making some alterations on a page I was working on from my work pc, not realising that I was sharing my work isp with some colleagues who busied themselves one lunchtime making a rude comment about a particular football team!

Anyway, back to the point, could there be some connection with the new book on Late Spring, Noriko Smiling by Adam Mars-Jones? I haven’t read the book yet, but I’m intrigued by it, despite Mars-Jones admission that he hasn’t seen many Ozu films, and isn’t an expert on Japanese film. Mars-Jones may well have a few enemies due to his reviews. Perhaps some disgruntled writer thinks Dylanexpert and Mars-Jones are one and the same?

Yeah, I can’t really think of a reason either why someone would want to pull out dylanexpert’s work on the article. The only reason given that I can see is that the article is long, which it certainly is, but articles are a little like strings in that their length should be determined by the purpose to which you apply them, not by some arbitrary limit.

While I love Wikipedia and use it daily, I really have no patience with the way it works, and therefore never contribute, other than briefly working on the Kurosawa article, which dylanexpert talked me into. 🙂

Thank you all for your kind comments. It was actually several people, not just one, who attacked the page, on the grounds that it was too long. (If I’d stuck to my original plan, it would have been much longer.) I wonder if that was just a pretext, however, since all these attackers (particularly “atomequal”) seem to enjoy getting under people’s skin for its own sake. Though they seem to be leaving me alone, for now anyway.

As for the length, I can’t image deleting any particular section, because each one represents some important aspect of Ozu scholarship. I could conceivably edit within sections, but I’ve already whittled away a lot.

Wikipedia is truly byzantine, particularly in its paranoid obsession with “free media.” (I’m thankful Late Spring is a public domain movie.) I wonder: did Kafka somehow foresee Wikipedia in a dream, and that is why he wrote the books he did?

Very close to the end of my work on the article. I hope I can interest members of the Wiki Japanese Cinema task force to help me promote it to Featured Article status.

Beautifully done, dylanexpert! That malevolent who disfigured your page is a stinker.

Very fine work, indeed, and I give it two thumbs up.