Talk:Love Theme from "The Godfather" (album)

Song information

The "Song information" section seems totally redundant.. it's extremely detailed information on the original songs and has little actual relevance to the album itself. The links in the track listing to the relevant song articles serve as sufficient sources of information. The info in the article should pertain to the actual recordings on the album and not the recordings they are covers of. Rehevkor ✉ 03:14, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Among other things, I'm documenting the fact that many (mostly Easy Listening) artists at the time were putting out albums that were mainly comprised of covers of the current songs on the radio. Someone who is too young to know this or has simply forgotten this era is not going to get a sense of the music industry during this period just from seeing that all the tracks on the album link to song pages. While links that assist in defining terms used are obviously helpful, nine or 10 different song page links would be tedious to go through, and most people wouldn't see the point in looking at more than a few of them.

But if there's a concise synopsis of what pertains to the album -- What's the history of the songs that this artist chose? Were the songs well known or obscure? What other artists had chosen these songs to record at that time? Was this the usual musical genre that this artist was known for? Is this an album of standards or Top 40 hits or a mix of both? -- if that information is right there to read, then the Wikipedia user is much more likely to come away from that album page knowing something new and liking the experience they had here.

As an example of a song page that has a link available for the user, let's take John Lennon's "Imagine", into which editors have clearly put a lot of time and effort. There are 86 cover versions listed there, but over 50 of them are from the past decade and very few of the others were released around the same time as this album I'm covering. In terms of this album page, this song page has a lot of irrelevant information, and even if the user doesn't mind the distraction, it diverts that person's focus from the original album of interest. If anything, a link like this is more likely to overload them with information that they're not asking for, dampen their interest in the album article they originally wanted to read, and leave them with an unsatisfying Wikipedia experience.

Again I have nothing against links, and I recognize the need for them. And I'm certainly not pushing for all album pages to write about each song. I'm just saying that there's the possibility of scattering the user's focus, and I'm more interested in keeping them satisfied with the time they've spent on the subject. Danaphile (talk) 06:37, 26 January 2011 (UTC)