Wikipedia:WikiProject Albums

For singles, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Songs.

Classical Music Portal

WikiProject Albums is an organization of Wikipedians dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of all kinds of musical albums. We seek ways of simplifying album pages so users can get the basic information fast, creating high-quality new pages, ensuring a standardized format and make articles as informative as possible. There is also a WikiProject Albums Featured Albums Project, which seeks to coordinate efforts to get as many albums as possible promoted to Featured status.

Feel free to ask questions on the talk page. Below is a basic guide to writing an article on a specific album of music; this is only a guide and you should feel free to personalize an article as you see fit, though others may change it to fit our standards.

When you create or find a new album page, please add {{Album}} to the top of the talk page and add a link to the page on List of albums. If the page has no infobox, you should also add a link to the page on Needs infobox. If the page has an incomplete infobox, note the missing details at Incomplete infobox. If the page has an old style infobox, add a link at Infobox conversion.

Style

Naming

Do not pre-emptively disambiguate! When there is no other encyclopedic use of the album title, the article should reside at the normal name, e.g. London Calling, not [[London Calling (album)]]. In cases where disambiguation is needed, the terms (album) or (EP) should be used, e.g. Insomniac (album). For multiple albums with the same title use the artist name to distinguish the different albums, i.e. Down to Earth (Rainbow album) and Down to Earth (Ozzy Osbourne album). For artists who release multiple albums under the same name, disambiguate by year or other commonly accepted convention, e.g. Weezer (The Blue Album) and Weezer (The Green Album).

Track listing

Songs and singles are placed in "quotation marks", album titles are italicized and artists are left alone, for example,

The Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is from their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

On song linkages: Don't link to a song that has no article unless you believe that the song most certainly deserves an article and/or you are willing to write it.

Capitalization

In titles of songs or albums, unless it is unique, the standard rule in the English language is to capitalize words that:

1. Are the first or the last word in the title
2. Are not conjunctions (and, but, or, nor), prepositions (to, over, through), articles (an, a, the), or the "to" in infinitives.

Dating

Please try to add the year in parentheses after mentioning an album for the first time in an article or paragraph (unless the year is contained within the sentence) as in: "Nirvana's next album was the breakthrough classic Nevermind (1991)". Do not use piped links to "years in music" e.g. [[1991 in music|1991]], instead add (see 1991 in music) where you feel it is appropriate.

Do not describe uncertain dates by using the season name, eg "released in winter, 1995". This can be ambiguous as northern- and southern-hemisphere seasons occur at opposite times of the year. Instead, use the most accurate date possible, such as "February 1995" or "early 1995", if a more precise date cannot be verified.

Disambiguation links

When linking genres and other terms in the article, be sure it points to the appropriate music-related article and not a disambiguation page. For example, Rock should point to Rock music and not Rock; Alternative should point to Alternative rock and not Alternative, a disambiguation page. Use piped links if necessary. Other terms to look out for are: pop (music), emo (music), band (music), album (music), EP (extended play), LP (gramophone record) and several more.

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Music for more style suggestions.

Categories

For album articles, there are three "top-level" categories: Category:Albums by artist, Category:Albums by year and Category:Albums by genre. Each album page is then placed into two categories, "Category:<Artist name> albums" and "Category:<year> albums", which are then placed as sub-categories into the respective top-level category. For consistency, the artist name should be the same as the title of their article (in terms of punctuation, "&"/"and", use of "The", etc.) minus any disambiguating terms of course.

For example, Reign in Blood by Slayer was released in 1986 so it has the categories Category:Slayer albums and Category:1986 albums. To add it to these categories, you would place the following code at the bottom of the article:

[[Category:Slayer albums]]
[[Category:1986 albums]]

Category:Slayer albums is a sub-category of Category:Albums by artist and Category:Thrash metal albums, which is a sub-category of Category:Albums by genre. Category:1986 albums is a sub-category of Category:Albums by year.

Previous discussions have formed the consensus that a category for an artist's albums should be created even if they have only released one album (irrespective of whether they are likely to release more in the future). Please ensure that every category you create belongs to at least one other category, otherwise, it cannot be navigated to and will be listed at Special:Uncategorizedcategories.

See also: Category talk:musical compositions

Stubs

If you find a stub article that has not yet been marked as a stub, please add to the bottom of the article one of the following stub templates:

• {{classical-album-stub}}
• {{Christian-album-stub}}
• {{country-album-stub}}
• {{electronic-album-stub}}
• {{folk-album-stub}}
• {{hiphop-album-stub}}
• {{jazz-album-stub}}
• {{rock-album-stub}}
  • {{1970s-rock-album-stub}}
  • {{1980s-rock-album-stub}}
  • {{1990s-rock-album-stub}}
  • {{2000s-rock-album-stub}}
  • {{Progressive-rock-album-stub}}
  • {{punk-album-stub}}
• {{metal-album-stub}}
• {{RnB-album-stub}}
• {{compilation-album-stub}}
• {{soundtrack-stub}}
• {{single-stub}}

Additionally, if you find a stub article which has only the basic {{album-stub}} template, if possible remove this basic template and add the appropriate subcategory template from the list above.

Infobox

Untitled

The standard infobox for album articles is the {{Album infobox}} template. The box to the right is an example. You can click on "edit this page" and copy-and-paste the markup to a different article, replacing the information with info on the album you choose to write about.

The infobox code should be placed at the top of the article.

Code

Most articles should only need the following fields (for the full list of parameters see advanced usage):

{{Infobox Album <!-- See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Albums -->
| Name        = 
| Type        = 
| Artist      = 
| Cover       = 
| Background  = 
| Released    = 
| Recorded    = 
| Genre       = 
| Length      = mm:ss
| Label       = 
| Producer    = 
| Reviews     = 
| Last album  = 
| This album  = 
| Next album  = 
}}

Colors

EPs	salmon
Original studio albums	orange
Live albums and live EPs	darkturquoise
Greatest hits, box sets and other compilations	darkseagreen
Cover and tribute albums	plum
Soundtracks and television theme songs	gainsboro

Album cover

• Upload a copy of the album cover (under fair use) - Ideally the image should be at least 200px wide (it'll be resized to 200px wide for display anyway).

• On the image description page, use the {{albumcover}} image copyright tag. Selecting "Album cover" from the pulldown list on the image upload page will accomplish this.

• Fill the template's Cover= line with the name of your file.

If you cannot find a cover image, just leave this line blank.

Details

Try to fill in as many of the details as you can. Type usually refers to general descriptions such as "Album", "Double album", "Live album", "Remix album", "Compilation album", "EP", and so on. Do not use descriptions specific to release format such as LP, CD or MC. The field can also include information such as the title of the film that an album is the soundtrack to, or the name of the compilation album series that a particular album is part of. The Released date should refer to the earliest known date. Similarly, Record label should refer to the label the album was originally released on. Where significantly different versions have been released (featuring alternate track listings) e.g. US vs UK, the later release date and/or record label should be mentioned in the article. Recorded should include details on where and when the album was recorded. If you can't find out some details, leave the section blank or with "???" to make it easier for someone else to fill in later.

If you link any terms, make sure you check your links and disambiguate accordingly. Under the Genre heading, for example, "Rock" should link to Rock music, "Alternative" should link to Alternative rock, "Punk" to Punk rock, and so on.

Professional reviews

Please note that the table should only include professional reviews -- that is not a precise term (and should, perhaps, be interpreted broadly), but please use your best judgement and do not include reviews from people or groups whose judgement our audience has no reason to respect. See below for some sources of professional reviews. The first bit of info should be the name of the source (most commonly a magazine like Rolling Stone -- note that magazines are italicized); due to their proliferation and dubious value, lists (e.g. Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Punk Rock Albums of the Early 1980s) may not be included. The second bit should be either a rating (e.g. 4/5) or the word favorable or unfavorable (possibly allowing for ambivalent, mixed, extremely favorable and more, but keep it short and simple). The third bit is preferably a link to the actual review on an official page; it may also be a summary of the review located elsewhere (if the original publisher doesn't include it online). If there are no online sources, you may include no link at all. The link should display as the date of the review being published, preferably including the page number -- even if there is no link, this information should still be included. If you can not find the date of publication, the word link will suffice. The reviews should be ordered alphabetically.

Chronology

The chronology section should link to the previous album on the left and the next album on the right. (Only studio albums, usually excluding lives, compilations, singles and EPs.)

• For first albums the left box (the "Last album=" field) should be left blank.
• For latest albums, the right box (the "Next album=" field) should be left blank, or with a " . . . ".
• For final albums, the right box (the "Next album=" field) should be left blank.

Wikipedia's date style guidelines recommend that years should not be linked within the chronology section.

Advanced usage

Untitled

In special situations, additional fields may be applicable:

{{Infobox Album | <!-- See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Albums -->
| Name        = 
| Type        = 
| Artist      = 
| Cover       = 
| Cover size  = 
| Caption     = 
| Background  = 
| Released    = 
| Recorded    = 
| Genre       = 
| Length      = mm:ss
| Label       = 
| Producer    = 
| Reviews     = 
| Compiled by = 
| Chronology  = 
| Last album  = 
| This album  = 
| Next album  = 
| Misc        = 
}}

Cover size

Use this field if you can't find a proper resolution cover (200px or bigger). Fill it with the width of the image you want to use.

Compiled by

Compiled by is only applicable to compilation albums of any kind where the person or entity responsible for selecting the album's track listing is known.

Chronology field

The Chronology field is useful when the album belongs to an overall series that is not adequately described by the artist's name alone; in these situations, the text entered in this field replaces the artist name that would normally be displayed preceding "chronology". Examples include series of compilation albums compiled by different people, and series of soundtracks (which are often "various artists" collections).

Misc

Two templates exist that can be inserted in the Misc field: {{Extra album cover}} and {{Extra chronology}}.

Template:Extra album cover

If the album has been released with different album covers, use this format to add them to the bottom of the infobox:

| Misc        = {{Extra album cover
  | Upper caption  = 
  | Background     = 
  | Cover          = 
  | Lower caption  = 
  }}
}}

Add a second set of closing brackets for the nested template. Caption allows an optional header to be inserted, with an explanatory label. Background, if used, should contain the same color as the rest of the infobox.

Template:Extra chronology

Additional chronologies are generally useful for split records, collaborative records, and series of albums.

| Misc        = {{Extra chronology
  | Artist     = 
  | Background = 
  | Last album = 
  | This album = 
  | Next album = 
  }}
}}

Format is the same as the standard chronology. As with the Extra album cover template, the Background field should contain the same color as the rest of the infobox.

Article body

The basics should be in the first paragraph: title, artist, release date, record label, and a word or two about genre and critical reception.

Describe history, trivia, themes (musical or lyrical), a consideration of its specific influences, specific followers, where it fits in its genre and what leanings it may have toward others, reasons for the order of tracks (if any), etc. Also, synthesize the general critical reception of the album, being as detailed as possible. Be sure to note minority opinions as well, properly attributed (preferably with an external link). Also, any way the album affected the cultural consciousness of a society or culture.

There are various methods for writing album articles, but in the course of writing them two distinct styles of article (that are actually opposite ends of a spectrum) have emerged most prominently, either of which may be appropriate, depending on the album in question.

• Include a paragraph on each song, describing its critical reception and relevance to the article as a whole. This may be more appropriate for concept albums, however loose, or albums written by people known for their songwriting. See Ziggy Stardust or Aquemini for examples.
• Focus on the album as a whole, mentioning specific songs only inasmuch as one song provides an example of a topic of interest to the entire album. This may be more appropriate for albums that are largely musical, without lyrics to explain, such as much of prog rock (e.g. Styx, Deep Purple, King Crimson), dance music (Donna Summer, Paul Oakenfold, *NSYNC) or other symphonic bands like Metallica or Pink Floyd. See Highway 61 Revisited or Violent Femmes for examples.

Add a paragraph or two on how the album fits in the development of music. What does it sound similar to? What inspired the artists? Who listened to this album, then started a band of their own and became famous ten years later?

For an example of a featured article, see Illmatic by Nas.

Track listing

(Note: Particularly for hip hop albums, it is helpful to list which members of a group (or guests) rap on which verses as well as mentioning sampling sources.)

1. "complete song title" (John Doe, Brian Smith) – 4:23
   • First Verse: Name of rapper
   • Second Verse: Name of rapper
   • Samples: Name of sample source (preferably, artist, song, album)
2. "complete song title" (Doe, Kelly Kalamazoo) – 3:24
3. "complete song title" (Doe, Kalamazoo, Smith, David Whitman) – 2:34

Note the standard method of attributing songwriters--write (and link) the full name the first time it appears, and then just give the last name (unless the first initial is necessary to disambiguate it, as in the Gallagher brothers of Oasis). If all songs were written by the same person/team, this can be stated at the top as in "(all songs written by Gordon Gano)"

Use an en dash (–) rather than a hyphen (-) as a dividing horizontal punctuation mark. (Note that they both look the same in the edit box) You can insert it from the special character list below the edit box (see Help:Special characters) or copy and paste it from here. You can also add it by writing &ndash; HTML entity to the edit box (like this "–") but this makes the code less readable. If you think that this is too difficult, you can still use a hyphen, and hope that someone is going to change it into a dash. This holds true both in "Track listing" and "Credits" sections. See also Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes).

The track length does not utilize parentheses ( ( )s ) or brackets ( [ ]s ), and is separated from track title with an en dash (–), as discussed above.

Using a table is recommended in more complicated situations (see Illmatic for example).

Credits

(names and instruments, link to instrument on first occurrence; pipe "percussion" to percussion instrument; pipe "keyboard" to keyboard instrument)

• Johnny Poe – guitar
• Sally Morris – glockenspiel, guitar, organ, kazoo

External links

• [chords]
• [lyrics]
• [parodies]
• [anything else relevant]

Discography

There are no explicit guidelines on how to incorporate an album article in a discography. Of course, there are several ways how it can be done. In all cases, please keep the following hints in mind:

• sort the albums, e.g. descending by date (since a discography is in some sense a chronology),
• if you use tables, use wikicode, to make the list easier to maintain.

A simple way to list albums could be:

• first album (year of release)
• second album (year of release)

Note that album titles should be in italics and only albums, not release years should be linked.

A different way using a table could be:

Title	Release date	Notes	Label
Firstname	1999-01-01	first studio album	Label name
Secondname	2000-01-01	another note	Label name

Some editors consider the use of image galleries in discographies an "unnecessary application" of fair use, although the practice is common and other editors see it as perfectly fair and reasonable (see e.g. Kylie Minogue discography, The Beatles discography). It might however be confusing to readers who expect the covers to link to the albums, not to image description pages. For a text only example, see Gorillaz discography.

For further examples, see:

• Category:Discographies

External links

The following sites provide reviews that you can use in album tables:

• MetaCritic.com : has no reviews but a list of most reviews from mags (RollingStone, Q Mag, Uncut, EW, etc.), websites (AllMusic, PopMatters, Amazon, etc.) and newspapers (Guardian, Village Voice, LA Times, etc.), normalized on a common scale, including links to online full reviews or excerpts from paper reviews with date and page (all reviews normalized on a 0-100 scale) -- very practical for quickly finding a lot of online reviews (instead of having to manually look up all of the others below), and very practical for having a meta-link to provide about paper-only reviews. (Example of a big Metacritic page:[1] - Example of an album wikipage mixing links and meta-links: Furious Angels)

• Rolling Stone (5-star scale)
• Popmatters (no formal rating for reviews published before 2005; 10-point scale thereafter)
• ARTISTdirect.com (5-star scale, plus user reviews)
• All Music Guide (5-star scale given in context with the artist's entire works)
• NME (New Musical Express) (10-point scale, at bottom of review)
• Pitchfork Media (10-point scale, precision to a tenth of a point)
• Alternative Press (5-point scale)
• Stylus Magazine (grades on an A, B, C, D, F scale)
• Buy.com : has no reviews, but does have a "professional reviews" link on the left side of album pages -- it contains brief excerpts from reviews from magazines like Mojo and NME, which do not have searchable online databases, and also includes the date and page of the review
• Robert Christgau (grades on an A, B, C, D, F scale)
• Piero Scaruffi (10-point scale, not all artists have ratings)
• Canoe.ca (portal for Sun Media newspapers in Canada)
• iq451.com has no reviews but has clickable links to many reviews, some of which are professional

See also

• Missing encyclopedic articles/List of notable albums
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Songs
• Wikipedia:WikiProject_Music/Tables_for_charts