Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Discographies/style

Same question, ten months later...

Is this actually still being discussed as a possible guideline? I see no evidence anywhere of that being the case, and if that's correct, can we please remove the tag? It seems to be causing some confusion for some editors. The Rambling Man (talk) 07:26, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

I don't know what it is either (although I still lean on it as if it were still misidentified as part of the MOS). By "tag" I assume you mean the "guideline" mention, not the "dormant" thingy. Wouldn't merely removing the tag leave it in limbo? Personally, I'd like to see this thing either adopted or deleted (preferably the former).

How shall we proceed? Wait for discussion to happen here (I expect it won't, even with personal individual invitations)? A posting at the Village Pump? A separate discussion (or announcement of this one) at WT:FLC (not to repeat the mistakes we made earlier)? How can we move ahead? — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 13:34, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

I don't know. It is a Wikiproject guideline so it ought to be members of the project who get involved and agree on it. It ought to involve FLC too as this "guideline" would appear to assist in the production line for featured list candidates; not many people will be bothered to follow DISCOGSTYLE without FLC in mind. All that concerns me really is that folks at FLC are being told to follow DISCOGSTYLE when there's not (and never has been) a consensus to do so. The Rambling Man (talk) 14:29, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Consensus

• I support this page and view that it should be instated as the policy/guideline for discographies. — Lil_℧niquℇ №1 ^[talk] 14:12, 21 September 2011 (UTC)
• As do I, support, this page. — Status {^talk_contribs  21:08, 24 September 2011 (UTC)
• Please note that for this to be acceptable (and most certainly only every as a style guide, never more), it has to be checked to be completely in adherence with WP:MOS (and to check this regularly given that MOS changes from time to time) or else demanding discographies comply with it at WP:FLC will lead to an unresolvable conflict, resulting in no further promotions of discogs to featured status based on the criteria, specifically clause 5, " It complies with the Manual of Style and its supplementary pages." I trust those editors voting here have checked that is the case. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:17, 24 September 2011 (UTC)
• Comment. There are few things I have noticed with the samples section.

How come the format for the Certifications/Sales in the album sample is not the same format as the Certifications in the singles sample? The albums sample is formatted like "Platinum (US)", while the singles is formatted "UK: Gold". I think the two should be consistently formatted. I know that a lot of FLs do it like the singles part but with bullets. Another difference between the samples are the chart headers' widths. The albums sample uses a width of 2.2em while the singles sample uses a width of 3.0em. Is there a reason for this difference? If these two concerns are fixed, I would be happy to support it.
—Michael Jester (talk) 06:31, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for examining the page. The certs/sales lists are in two different flavors because both those styles have been used, and no consensus has (AFAIK) been formed to prefer either one of them. They should at least be consistent within an article, however. Of cource, having one form for an albums section sample and another form for a singles section sample may mislead folks to think they should be different, and they certainly shouldn't. Do folks here want to define one or the other? What's our preference?

The column widths are different because they're two different kinds of tables (see especially the Title column in both examples). Using different widths was also a deliberate choice to indicate that the width depends on the individual article; editors shouldn't think every discog in WP must use 2.2em columns because that's the one width we used for our examples.

One of the difficulties I have with this page is clearly enunciating what "must" be (use scope="col", etc.) and what is suggested but flexible (width:2.2em with lots of columns, if contents fit, or 3em or 4.5em for fewer columns or where more space is needed). — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 05:25, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for clearing that up. Personally, I agree on using "US: Platinum" as the way to define the certifications. I feel it would be easier for the reader to understand.
—Michael Jester (talk) 06:31, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

I've changed it. — Status {^talk_contribs  01:35, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

This guide claims one thing, but many other discographies are structured in different ways. An example are the country music artists. I don't understand why the sub-genre chart is posted before the main chart in their page. Furthermore, the countries of the peak chart positions, aren't never in alphabetical order after the country where the artist is born. For the albums table, i support this guide, also if would be better to switch the order of the colum of the certifications and sales and in the column of the sales, to explain when the sale posted is refered to retail sales or shipment sales based on certifications. For the singles table, same thing and add that the year would be posted before the name of the single. Furthermore, i propose that for the artists with great impact that have got many and many certifications and/or many albums charted in several countries, in addition to standard page, would be good to creat also two pages of deepening: one for the peak chart positions and one for the certifications and sales, like happens in the Elvis Presley discography, or Michael Jackson discography. After all, we should offer as much information as possible. This is an encyclopedia, no? SJ (talk) 03:22, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

• Unresolved issue: B-sides / tracklists The section on what should not be included still includes
  "Tracklistings, B-sides, or any other description of the tracks on a release. Remember, this is a discography not a songography, so we're mostly concerned with the release, not every song on that release."
  This highly controversial part of the proposal has been debated in the past (e.g. here) but failed to achieve consensus. If the page is to be promoted to guideline status, this should first be removed, unless further discussion results in a clear consensus. It could be worth considering a modified version which may be less contentious, such as: "Tracklistings, B-sides, or any other description of the tracks on a release which is the subject of a separate article. In such cases the relevant article should be linked." Contains Mild Peril (talk) 15:27, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Since nobody's replied to this point here, and some editors in the current discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(music) have expressed support for including tracklistings of releases which are insufficiently notable to have their own articles, I've gone ahead and changed it. Contains Mild Peril (talk) 22:46, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose I have several queries, which I will outline below in separate sections. The Rambling Man (talk) 16:36, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

WP:FONTSIZE

Please be aware that the manual of style regards the use of deliberately forcing smaller text as inappropriate. I see the use of html tags in your examples here, such as <small> which I suppose does not necessarily meet with the expectations of MOS. The Rambling Man (talk) 16:29, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

I looked and found this markup on the catalog numbers in the sample Albums table. I guess some people thought the smaller text would be better for these, perhaps because catalog numbers are kind of gobbledygookish and hard to read. I'd accept them at full 100% size, if that's the consensus, but I think others will dislike that too much.

In any case, I consider the ca. 75% produced by the <small> markup to be too small, and would prefer markup (if these are to be made somewhat smaller than normal) like <span style="font-size:85%;"></span>, with the size at 90% (as with country col headings and legend footer) or 85% (as in the "featuring Ricky Nelson" example) at the lower limit. — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 23:14, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

"—" denotes releases that did not chart.

I think this should also include "or was not released in that territory" as "releases that did not chart" implies a release actually happened in every territory in the table. It should be also be noted that for a "release" that didn't chart in any territory, it must be individually referenced as the chart references will clearly not cover them. The Rambling Man (talk) 16:32, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Good point, and I thought that both possibilities had been in there together in earlier versions, but I'm not finding such. I guess I've just seen it in live articles.

I'm inclined to word it as "denotes a recording that did not chart or was not released in that territory." Actually, I'm not so satisfied with the word "that" in the sentence, but "a" or "the" don't strike me as ideal, either. If I don't get negative feedback (fairly soon) on my recasting above, I'll just change the examples.

BTW, while I'm here: this legend in the footer implies we should not add dashes to Certifications columns where no certs have been awarded. I have, however, seen dashes added to discogs in that case. Any opinions one way or the other? — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 23:26, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

I think there's a general philosophy to avoid completely blank cells. Admittedly, now the en-dash has a specific meaning in this case, it cannot be used to denote None... But a whole lot of "None"s could be overwhelming too. Not sure at the moment... The Rambling Man (talk) 09:36, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

Is there any reason why something like {{n/a}} could not be used, either for instances where a record was not released in a territory, or for releases which did not chart, or both? --Stemonitis (talk) 13:08, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

That template is all but undocumented, but I take the expression "n/a" (or N/A as the template outputs it) to mean either "not available" or "not applicable". For recordings not released at all in a territory, no charting is expected, so "not applicable" might be a close match. However, the confusion with "not available", as for Canadian Country songs, or songs from 1950 which may have peaked on a Cashbox chart, or even new songs which surely charted but can't be listed because Billboard revamped (or crashed) their website again, is too great. (Besides which, I don't much care for that caps-on-gray-background look.) Still thinking... — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 13:54, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

Singles sales

Perhaps I'm being dense, but albums table given here has a "sales" column (along with certification) but the singles table doesn't. Why the inconsistency? The Rambling Man (talk) 16:34, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Addressed in Fundamental philosophy of the Samples section below. — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 23:28, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Row spanning

Just a query really, why do you intend to "rowspan" the album (for multiple singles from a particular album) but you don't "rowspan" the year of release for singles released in a single year? Have you consulted anyone commensurate with WP:ACCESS about any of this? The Rambling Man (talk) 16:36, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

This one's a bit nasty. As you probably know, rowspan and colspan cause problems for sorting (to put it mildly) and, I think, don't help with accessibility much either. When we talked about these revised samples (with User:Dodoïste, User:RexxS, User:Jack Merridew and (I thought, but am no longer sure) User:Graham87, all accessibility-aware folks), I think we ended up coming to the consensus that (1) we're kind of stuck with rowspanned "Peak chart positions" for now by dint of very wide usage, (2) colspans are problematic but much-loved on WP discogs, so that we show non-spanned examples but allow spanned usages on actual articles, and (3) we might best achieve some improvements regarding multi-cell spans in a future battle, but for now a fair compromise means letting go on this point. — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 23:43, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Chart abbreviations

There's often some debate over the correct abbreviations to use for a particular country's chart. This guide should state how this is done. For instance, is Germany GER or DEU, is Denmark DEN or DAN? The Netherlands NDL or NLD? Where do editors go to find the right answer? The Rambling Man (talk) 16:38, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

We currently say, "Column headers for chart positions should be an English-language abbreviation of the chart's country of origin, not the name of the individual chart." I guess that means that, for Germany, Denmark and Switzerland, we "have" to use "GER", "DEN", and "SWI" instead of "DEU", "DAN", and "CH" or "CHE". "NDL" is just plain wrong, but I have seen "NET" (and "NED") for Netherlands chart indicators. We don't actually specify what the "right" English-language abbreviation to use is, and I'd rather not see a list added to the page.

I'd personally prefer using ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 or alpha-3 codes (or either), but that leads quickly to the question of ordering: do we then order by code ("AUS", "CHE", "DEU", "NOR", "NZL") or by English equivalent ("AUS", "DEU", "NZL", "NOR", "CHE")? To me, labelling and ordering by ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 makes the most sense (with a possible allowance of using alpha-2 codes for some or all countries (NL, NZ, UK, US, etc.). That would be better than or current usual practice of using some English indicator and see what survives the reversions. — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 00:05, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

Fundamental philosophy of the Samples section

I'm glad people are looking at this page again, and I hope it will end up being looked at and discussed by many more than just The Rambling Man.

In the comments above this section right now, I see a repeated concern about the two samples on the actual project page. The upper table is a sample of albums listings, and the lower table is a sample of singles listings. They are naturally different, not least because they are examples of (what we want to call "preferred") ways to list two different kinds of recordings. Further, they are deliberately taken from two different articles. However, it seems that these differences are causing confusion about how to do discography tables and, worse, may also be undermining trust in the page as a possible guideline for discog editors.

Each table is meant to be just one single example of what that kind of table should look like. Actual column widths should depend on the particular discog the tables are on (see my attempts at explanation in Consensus above). Whether a sales column appears in either table (or both, or neither) depends on the particular discog and the sourced info available. Whether Finland's peaks are used depend on decisions about the individual discog, and is not dependent on the fact that both sample tables happen to have FIN columns.

Do you have suggestions about how we can better explain the variability of these samples, or is the whole concept of the page ill-devised? We could go into detail about column and row heading markup and point to MOS:DTT, for example. The gist of the page is supposed to be what comes before the samples; the samples help (AFAIAC) provide examples of layout and markup which can be copied and adapted individually. There's also the IAR section at the end, which should encourage editors to select and arrange columns as best suited to the individual artist's works. Perhaps that part needs rewording, or relocation? — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 23:01, 1 October 2011 (UTC)