Music:Proposed policies/archive

For Final Decisions
Be sure to check the Policies Page!

What we are working on
I am working on: Michael Ardaiolo - Update: I have just finished going through all the song entries and cleaning them up (adding album links/fixing song links/etc.) and moving them to Song Title:Artist pages. I also pulled some stuff off the Music:Community Portal to-do list. So, it's looking like all we need to do is have someone go through the Artist pages and change the discographies over to the right format, finish cleaning up the albums (which Michael's been a complete MACHINE on), and checking things template-wise. I think the Songs should be OK in that regard. At least, pretty close, anyway, heh. So, yeah. I'm gonna go take me a shower now and get ready for work. -- Rev. Syung Myung Me 18:35, 14 Nov 2005 (UTC) - I've just changed over the Main Page from Main Page test to making it live, set up a bit more of the Music:Featured Article stuff, and added Template:Stub and Template:Wikipedia to address both points about articles that are stubs and those that are ripped directly from Wikipedia. Feel free to twiddle with those a bit, of course, but I think they'll work for the time being. I've also cleaned this page up a little bit, and updated the Policies page as well. I might surf around a little for other Stubs (I know the Stereolab page is definitely in need of a Stubbing), and tag them, too. For the time being, though I'm thinking I'm going to work a little bit more on adding more pages, and also perhaps gear up the promotion side of things. What d'yall think? I think we're getting much more ready for Prime Time, now!
 * 1) updating all my reviews; cleaning pages, rewriting reviews, fixing links
 * 2) going back to artist pages I wrote and fixing the links
 * 3) adding discography to labels (probably should be a link, Label:Discography (possible category?)

Perhaps the three of us should take a look at the Music:Community Portal page and talk about what else needs to be done and how to go about it? One thing we could also think about is how the starwars wiki has a "Improvment Project Of The Week" type thing -- should we adopt the same thing (I know there was some thought about this a while ago), and if we should, should we wait for there to be more people contributing, or should we just start on it now? And, other things we should add to the new front page? (Remember, the Main Page test page still exists if people want to experiment/copy stuff over/etc.)  Anyway, though, I just thought I'd sort of do an update as to where I'm at. - Rev. Syung Myung Me 23:28, 19 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Promotion?
Thought we should maybe think about ways to promote the wiki, since we're getting pretty close to it being "Ready For Prime Time". I know we've all been sort of promoting it a bit elsewhere, but once we get Pretty Much Done, it might be time to ramp that up a bit.

Anyway, ideas:


 * Writing articles/posts/etc. that reference YSS articles naturally (just so it's not spamming). Like if you wrote a review that people are talking about, just be all like "Oh, yeah I liked that record/thought it sucked -- wrote a review here if you're interested! or something of that note.
 * Inter-wikicity links. For example, soundtrack stuff might be linked over at c:filmguide:Main Page, and back and forth -- we might want to talk to those people and see if they'd like to do a cross-reference type thing going on between the two cities.  (The way you'd do those links is, say, "This is the soundtrack album to c:filmguide:Spider-Man" or whatever.)  We could do other links at other wikicities the same way (i.e., if we wanted to link over at another article to our city, you'd just do c:en.music:Decisions).  (For a list, Wikicities has a complete list and follow the "info" links to find out the Interwiki Link.)
 * (Put into action) I've been mirroring my Mix CD tracklistings at Art Of The Mix with a link over here for the Complete Song-By-Song Liner Notes. Stuff like that might be useful.

Anyway, other ideas are always good -- perhaps this should be spun off into its own page? - Rev. Syung Myung Me 21:03, 12 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Great ideas.. blogs are probably our best bet... because those are also people who are more apt to contribute as well. Sorry it's taking so long to fix all the albums. Fixing the all the links along with revising is taking longer than I thought. Michael Ardaiolo

Another idea I had about promotion -- probably one further down the line, though -- is perhaps using the Artist Pages to create Guides-To artists? Sort of like what I did with The Residents; I'm thinking that if we've got bands we're obsessive about (and I figure that the mere fact we're putting so much into this implies that we all do), particularly ones with a lot of records and a fan base that's pretty strong/devoted, perhaps it'd be a good way to draw people in to the Wiki -- hook them with the allure of writing record guides/helping out with those/doing "for newbies" type guides or whatever, and then get them in looking around the rest of the site (and it might be kind of a chain; if you want to help out with The Residents one, you might be into They Might Be Giants or DEVO, too, and help out with that, and then you might start surfing around by label/RIYL/Mix CDs/whatever?

Also -- at some point, maybe soon, I'll put the beginning touches on a Links Page, as we talked about before. So, uh, yeah -- anyway, just thought I'd throw that idea out there! - Rev. Syung Myung Me 01:33, 29 Nov 2005 (UTC)

New Main Page
Just fiddling around with an idea for a new main page over at Main Page test. So, go check that out. I started with the wikicities default one, and then on top of that pasted in one from w:c:starwars, just because their front page was a) First on the list of popular wikicities (inlcuding us! Whoo!) b) Looked kinda neat.

So, it's so not finished, but I thought that might be useful to fiddle about with. Anyway, I gots to go to work, so yeah. Feel free to mess around with that as sort of a sandbox. once we get it finished, we can always just copy/paste it over to the main page and delete the test one.- Rev. Syung Myung Me 19:21, 16 Nov 2005 (UTC)

That looks wonderful... well incompletely wonderful, but wonderful nonetheless. If I get a chance, I'll try to play with it too. Michael Ardaiolo

Signing Articles
I have been giving this some thought, and I think we should stop signing articles/reviews, etc. (except for the personal mixtape stuff). My reason is because the whole idea of this site is having the first music critique/encyclopedia site by committee rather than singular personal taste. If there is a signature at the end of an article, it not only takes that characteristic away from us, it may prevent someone from editing because they don't think they should. If anything, we can add a section at the bottom of each page like Contributed: and then a list of names who made significant contributions to the article, or something similar. I really feel that this should be done, but to reiterate the committee value of the site, I'll put it to a vote: VOTE: Should names of contributers have it's own section rather than individual signings to each article?
 * Yes Michael Ardaiolo 06:03, 17 Nov 2005 (UTC)
 * No; I think that one of hte strengths of this sort of thing is that you can have multiple points of view; I think that stuff that's with no real point of view (i.e. Artist bios) should remain unsigned and basically free-for-all to edit, but reviews'n'such should be signed, but people should be encouraged to offer different points of view; I'm afraid that if there's a committee-type review, it'll end up being a situation where albums only one of us has heard will have a strong POV, but others where say, all of us will have heard it will end up being a wishy-washy sort of review; the wikipedia type of review. While I adore Wikipedia, reviews are one thing they don't do well, because the reviews are always of the sort where it's "Some fans find this album to be weak, while other fans thing it's the band's strongest!", which, well, doesn't really help you learn anything about the record.  I think you'll get more out of "This is the worst record ever because X, Y, and Z, and this band should be ashamed! -- Reviewer 1"  "This album is the band's best, because of A, B and C!  These are the aspects about this type of pop music I adore! -- Reviewer 2".  You tend to find people you agree with more than others, but you always have that alternate point of view going on.  I've seen sites do this sort of thing before (TMBG.org did this with some of their song interpretations; where they went from being individual submissions to being a long essay where everything was of the "some X say foo, some Y say bar!" type, and, well, it just seems kinda weird to me -- why not just have X say foo, and Y say bar?  But that's just me - Rev. Syung Myung Me 06:46, 17 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Genres
Firstly, note taken on the review signing thing. This is why we vote... Ok, next, I believe we need to discuss the genre categories, because as I update the albums, I have not been linking them. I kind of think that we should have a number of large genre categories, pop, rock, jazz, blues, electronica, folk, country, etc, then have sub-categories within those, if possible. Otherwise, there are so many genres out there, especially, hyphenated pseudo-genres, that it would be a lot easier to browse that way. Maybe we could have one category for all genres, then have sub-categories within each major genre. Is that possible? By just browsing the allmusicguide, they have their major "popular" genres as (and I'll add our existing genres in subcategories):
 * Avant-Garde
 * Bluegrass
 * Blues
 * Cajun
 * Celtic
 * Comedy
 * Country
 * Alt. Country (which should probably either be changed to Alternative Country or Alt-Country)
 * Easy Listening
 * Electronica
 * Dance
 * Electropop
 * Folk
 * Gospel
 * Jazz
 * Latin
 * New Age
 * R&B
 * Rap
 * Reggae
 * Rock
 * Indie Rock (which should be Indie-Rock)
 * Indie Pop (which should be Indie-Pop)
 * New Wave
 * Pop
 * Punk
 * Soundtrack
 * Vocal
 * World

Otherwise, things could get very hard to navigate. And, would this be one of the few instances where it would actually be good to add empty templates when you add a genre link in your writing, since that way, someone can look to see if it already exists? And, does capitilization matter, or in the reviews, do we need to write indie rock ? Michael Ardaiolo 16:10, 17 Nov 2005 (UTC) - Fair enough, on the review signing; I hope I didn't come off as preachin' or nothin', I just don't like voting "no" without explaining it; discussion's always important!

As for the genre thing -- that actually sounds like it makes a LOT more sense. The genre stuff is kind of weird and nebulous anyway, so it'd probably be good to have some sort of coordinated attack on that front. And this is probably better than doing a laundry list of weird, red-linked sub-sub-sub-genres.

That might actually be a good idea, too, with the putting in empty templates. Perhaps if we each take a few and at least drop in some brief information, just like, I don't know, a line or two, we might be set. So that way, if someone DOES click on say, "World", they get at least SOMETHING, but not a lot. (And it seems, too, that sometimes that's a good way to encourage editing; if someone's really into world, and they see a blank page, they might go "Oh, that sucks..." and move on, but if they see something that's like "World music is music that's inspired by the world", they might go "Oh, man, that's STUPID, here, I'll show 'em how it's done" and actually write something good, which'd be fine by me.

And capitalization does matter, but I think redirects work a lot, so if you do end up doing "indie rock" and it comes up red, and you know that there IS an Indie Rock page, you could just throw in the Redirect command. That's how Wikipedia does that sort of thing, and it seems to be a pretty elegant solution if'n you ask me. - Rev. Syung Myung Me 18:06, 17 Nov 2005 (UTC)

OK, word. I might play with that a bit tonight and see if I can get a chunk of genres up there. Also, I'm thinking we should make a link on each of the genre pages that is like "Bands in this wiki that are listed under this genre." Maybe Genre:Linked Bands, or something of that nature. That way, there is a place where someone can browse all bands discussed on this site for that genre, but it doesn't clutter the main genre page. And then I'll stop procrastinating and get back to updating those album pages. Michael Ardaiolo 00:25, 18 Nov 2005 (UTC)

That would be pretty cool. The cool thing is, an easy way to fill out those "Linked Band" pages would probably be just copy-pasting from the "What Links Here" link in the toolbar! There might be some other way to automatically generate pages like that, though -- not sure, though. But yeah, that would probably be pretty cool! - Rev. Syung Myung Me 08:07, 18 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Sidebar Articles?
Hm -- what would people think about doing "sidebar articles", sort of like how you'll see in magazines or encyclopedias sometimes -- stuff that doesn't really fit into a normal article, like on a genre or an artist, but is sort of a supplemental essay (possibly opinion related). One of the ones I'm thinking of cleaning up and putting here is this thing I wrote on the history of the downfall of Country Music. It wouldn't really be in place on, say, the Country genre page, but it could maybe be linked as its own thing... like a "See Also" type thing. What do you think, sirs? - Rev. Syung Myung Me 23:00, 19 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Thay would definitely bring something different to the site... i kind of like the "See Also..." thing. Could really liven up the site. But, just to have an opposing view on the subject, could also take away some of the "respectability" as far as pure information goes. Could that be something more for the discussion page for Country? Maybe, a link that simply says "sidebar articles" as you suggested, and bulleted links like #The Downfall of Country:Reveme. I don't see why it would do anything but add more writers/readers.. especially if you left it open to criticism/discussion etc. Mpardaiolo 03:07, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)

I hear you loud and clear on the respectability issue -- I think we'd have to make clear that the sidebars are Essays, and not really Articles per se, and they should be always signed and everything. I'm not sure if it'd really fit the Discussion Page -- I tend to think of those more as pages about the page itself (i.e. "would such-and-such fit on here?" "Should I expand that a little bit?") and less about the content. (I think this is also just because I know MediaWiki doesn't include talk pages in their page counts, so..8) But that might be cool to do. Perhaps a way to tag them outside would be to do Title Of Sidebar:Essay, just so that way it's clear right up in the address bar that this is a opinion piece and should be treated as such? Also I suppose we should ask where the "See Also" links should appear -- just on the main page it's related to, or on the pages it references? (like, say, in this example, would we just get "See Also" on the Country page, or also on (hypothetical at this point) Conway Twitty, Garth Brooks, Dwight Yoakam pages? I could go either way -- on one hand, it's cool to have those essays (not just mine, hopefully!) linked where people can see and read them, but on the other hand, it might be a bit of clutter on the pages.  And, yeah -- definitely, like everything I'm about -- I don't think any of these would be set in stone. - Rev. Syung Myung Me 17:20, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Ok, all that sounds good to me; opinions are necessary for true evaluation of art. As far as where the links go... (using the country one as an example) should be definitely on genre page, or at least the Pop-Country page. Maybe there should be a link like See Also then inside that could be seperated sections where essays can be grouped, or some thing similar. And each link could be The Downfall of Country. Then it could also be linked on the "see also" pages of all the artists/albums/labels/etc it references in the essay. Mpardaiolo 19:14, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Hm -- maybe we should just have one big "See Also" page, where each essay has a link at the end of it. So, say, for this example, the Country, Pop Country and Alt. Country pages (and whatever else) each have a See Also link at the bottom, then when you click on See Also, you get a list of articles, and somewhere in it, you've got:
 * The Downfall Of Country (Country; Pop-Country, Alternative Country) after it?

Either that, or I'm thinking perhaps a See Also type thing (sort of like the Nomination Links have?), where we've got the See Also page in a TOC'd page by source page. So, you'd get a page that's got headers for Country, Pop-Country, Alt. Country (etc.), each with a bulleted link to that Downfall essay (plus whichever other sidebars would fit in there). Pros and Cons for each:

With the (link, link2, link3) method - you see a list of everything that's easy, and it doesn't take up a lot of real estate. But on the down side, once there are a lot of essays, it might be harder to find ones -- also how to organize? By first page linked? By title?

With the

Header1:
 * Essay

Header 2:
 * Essay

thing, it'd be easy to find all related sidebars to a particular page, but it'd take up a lot of real estate, and it might be a little silly to see the same essay listed like fifty times under each different Source-Page.

What I was originally thinking, was just a, say:

See Also:

 * EssayTitle1
 * EssayTitle2
 * EssayTitle3

type thing at the bottom of the articles which have sidebars that go along with them. And then, there'd be a, say "Sidebar Essay" category (linked from the front) that'd have everything there for the pickin'. But I don't know, really; just throwin' stuff out there -- Rev. Syung Myung Me 21:21, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)

That sounds good to me... I definitely like the ideas of essays, and how it is done... well it really doesn't matter to much to me. Whatever you think is best, more power to you. It is something that will evolve naturally I'm sure any ways, just like everything else has. Do what you think is best. Mpardaiolo 23:40, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Links Page?
One thing I had an idea for that might be cool, is to do a links page -- we might want to protect it, and use the discussion page as a place to nominate stuff, so you don't get every Tom, Dick & Harry adding their own personal site, but just a list of links that we find or have found useful in our research for the site, or where we find new bands, or other wikis we dig or whatnot. I _think_ if it's protected, then only admins can edit (but anyone could post to the discussion page), but that should be possibly played around with. And I think I will on Test. But yeah -- just sending that out as a floater. - Rev. Syung Myung Me 17:20, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Yea, I definitely want extra pages on music websites, publications, blogs, radio stations, venues, etc., but I figured it was more important to get the basic stuff done first. I think it is a good idea to lock at least the website pages as well. I like the idea of nominating websites for addition, or at least put them up for review first. And it seems like the test worked. Mpardaiolo 19:18, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Cool -- I just killed Test, so that's not a problem. Yeah -- doing links later is probably good, too. Anyway one thing to think of -- should we just do a list of links, or do you think it'd be better to do something sort of like the High Weirdness Project where the link list is a bunch of WikiWords, each leading to a page that's like:

http://www.blahblahblah.com

Blahblahblah.com is a page that tells you how to skin your own deer! It's awesome for when you put on your Nuge records!

(The alternate would basically be one page with:
 * http://www.blahblahblah.com
 * Blahblahblah.com is a page that tells you how to skin your own deer! It's awesome for when you put on your Nuge records!

)

This is probably getting ahead of ourselves anyway, but it might be cool to keep in mind - Rev. Syung Myung Me 21:12, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)

I think individual pages for them would be best, just like everything else. That would leave the door open for more info, examples, logos, etc. on each, and also leaving the door open for discussion as well. It's something that probably deserves a template and category too. It never hurts to open up more possibilities for people to write and contribute. This is something that eventually needs to happen, but like you said, no rush. I am more concerned with getting all the existing pages correct before adding more. Tonight, I am going to try to finish up the 'the' bands, fix all the links for the artist and label pages i did a while back and then back to the album updates. Mpardaiolo 23:51, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)

'The' Bands
I know we discussed this earlier, but having a link that simply says "Beatles" on the artist page did not seem right. They were always known as The Beatles. For alphabetic sake though, I think bands like this should be listed as Beatles, The with redirects on The Beatles and Beatles. Mpardaiolo 03:07, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)

That might work -- that'd probably make the list look the most elegant, anyway! - Rev. Syung Myung Me 17:04, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)

OK, well I'll fix them accordingly. Mpardaiolo 19:15, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Cool -- I just undid one (eels) because it's one of those, like Talking Heads, where the offiical name doesn't actually have a "the" in it. Otherwise, though, that's pretty cool - Rev. Syung Myung Me 21:08, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)