Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Clustering of composers

Clustering of composers

Clustering of composers (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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Essentially, original research and a kind of personal essay, along with the conflict of interest issues inherent when the article's author is also the author of the only two cites. A search of GBooks and GScholar reveals that the author seems to be the only person who uses the titular phrase and is apparently trying to promote its validity here. (I was aware of similar searches by Tokyogirl79 but have also performed my own.) Ubelowme _U ^Me 01:47, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

• Delete - this odd WP:POV WP:ESSAY fragment is written by a user with the same name as one of the authors of each of the two papers cited, so it appears we have a WP:COI here, with the suspicion this is a promotion. The same user (in one of his other 3 edits) added a cite to another of his papers on the same topic to Geographical cluster. No independent sources found. Chiswick Chap (talk) 06:39, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
• Delete - per nom. Mr T^{(Talk?) (New thread?)} 06:56, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
• Keep, then Merge to Composer, and then redirect. The material may not be enough for a stand-alone article, but it is certainly worthy of inclusion in Composer. This is most definitely not original research or an "essay". It has been published in a peer-reviewed journals and although the exact phrase may not occur frequently, the concept/phenomenon has been studied and noted by others as well. See [1], [2], [3], [4]. The COI argument has no bearing whatsoever on whether reliably sourced and useful, encyclopedic information should be incorporated into Wikipedia. Voceditenore (talk) 08:42, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

• Note: This discussion has been notified to WikiProject Composers. Voceditenore (talk) 08:48, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

• Keep – As Voceditenore has shown, it's not WP:POV but part of the scientific discourse. Wikipedia has many articles where academic authors have contributed and cited their own papers. This is generally a good thing™. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 12:56, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
  • Comment With all due respect, V. hasn't shown anything of the sort. It could easily be POV or even spam, we don't know, and it certainly runs the risk of being thought WP:UNDUE or otherwise unbalanced, as the article gives precisely no weight to anyone else's published material. Further, it doesn't cite "multiple, independent sources", but essentially one dependent source, namely himself. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:03, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
    • Reply With all due respect, this article reports the results of a series quantitative analyses referenced by articles in peer-reviewed academic journals. I've just shown you that similar studies and works have been done, with similar results. The fact that the article contents could be improved by expansion and the addition of further sources, which I have shown clearly exist, is not an argument for deletion at all. I suggest you read the other sources I linked above before saying we have no idea whether this is "POV or spam". Incidentally, having an your work used as a reference in Wikipedia, let alone having written a WP article doesn't make a blind bit of difference to whether an academic gets tenure. Nor are they paid for their articles in academic journals. Voceditenore (talk) 13:31, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
• Delete. If you could show that there are other people (other than the same 2-3 authors that work together in groups) who have written about this concept in independent and reliable sources such as peer reviewed journals, I'd be willing to say that it could be merged into another article. It's just that really, the only people that seem to be talking about this are the ones in the journals in the article. There's not enough coverage to show that this concept is really all that notable in the long run. There's no depth of coverage here, which is ultimately why I'm voting delete. If one person has a theory that's great, but you need multiple people weighing in to show that it's more than just Steve Smith stating a theory, even if it is in a peer reviewed journal. As readers of journals of any type can vouch, being in a PR journal doesn't guarantee notability and that in order to gain any true weight, the research/tests/etc needs to be followed up on by others to verify what has been done and give it more weight. So far this doesn't seem to really have happened. It's something to watch, but right now it's just not really enough out there at the moment.Tokyogirl79 (talk) 13:35, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

• If by some chance you can find other journals, this would probably have to be re-named to "Theory of the clustering of composers" or something to that extent, as it seems to be more of a theory put out by a handful of people. The big issue here is that while you could find things that talks about composers in various cities or the reasons why certain cities would be appealing for various reasons to composers of various time periods, there's not really anything out there that talks about this specific concept of it. That's my general problem with this, that this is such a new concept and has received pretty much little to no coverage outside of the same 2-3 people working on it together that there's not really much to show that it merits much at this point in time. As with work/coverage on any concept, you just have to give it time for other historians/researchers/scientists/etc to notice it, write about it in their own journals, and go from there. This is just far too premature to include at this point in time. It looks like it really only started to get written about in the last 2 years, which is fairly recent as far as any sort of concept work goes. Sometimes stuff like this can sit around unnoticed for years before others start publishing papers about it. It's just too soon.Tokyogirl79 (talk) 13:52, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

• Actually, it's not true that this only got started in the last two years. All of the sources I identified above were specifically chosen because they are not by any members of the Trinity College, Dublin research group who are working in this area, i.e. the authors currently cited in the article. F. M. Scherer's work on this goes back to 2001. Much of it is summarized in his 2003 book Quarter Notes and Bank Notes:The Economics of Music Composition in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries and the term "clustering of composers" is specifically mentioned in relation to his work in Handbook of Creative Cities. I'm arguing for this article to be kept so that the material can merged into Composer and then redirected. The redirect's history is needed to provide attribution for the original material. Incidentally, the clustering of musicians in particular cities and changes in that over time is an objective fact. The explanations for why they cluster are theoretical, not the clustering itself. The WP article provides no theoretical explanation for this clustering, although Shearer's work does. Voceditenore (talk) 14:16, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

• @Chiswick Chap: The article is not about the authors, so the source cannot be regarded as "dependent". The four sources Voceditenore provided show that the term is used and subject to scientific analysis. That establishes the raison d'être for this article, or a section in Composer and Geographical cluster. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:48, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Mmm, but I'd be much happier with the idea of a section in one of those other articles than a stand-alone article here. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:03, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

• Keep, then Merge to Composer, and then redirect per voceditenore. Multiple reliable tertiary sources support the content. No valid POV concerns that I can see based on the sources presented by voceditenore.4meter4 (talk) 17:55, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
• Merge to Composer, and then redirect as above and Voceditenore .--Smerus (talk) 17:58, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
• Keep, rename and expand -- I suggest Clustering of intellectual activity Though is could be generalized even further==the phenomenon is often called "Schools" -- in painting: there see School of Paris or New York School. For an example other fields, see the links at Chicago School and Vienna School. As Voceditenore indicates, there is a very wide and diverse literature--he just discussed music but it applies very much more widely, and is studied by geographers and historians as well as economists. If Voceditenore will expand the part on music, I and other will expand it in other subjects also and in a more general direction If he'd rather do it as a separate article on with Music, or even integrated into the History of Music article, I will nonetheless write at some point a more general article and I think many others here would work on it. It's time we expanded our coverage in the humanities from articles on individual people & works of art, supplemented by vague general articles, to discussions of significant theories and intellectual currents. DGG ( talk ) 20:55, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I'd be happy with keeping this as a stand-alone, expanded and retitled along the lines you suggest. I'll do some slight expansion of the music section later today. I don't want to put in too much work, however, in case the "verdict" is delete. Voceditenore (talk) 06:40, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

PS Despite my user name (Italian for tenor voice), I'm a "she". It's just my favourite type of voice. :) Best, Voceditenore (talk) 07:37, 15 October 2012 (UTC)