Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Jazz

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Assessment of importance

In this edit Vmavanti has changed the project Importance rating on Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity from Top to low. I was very surprised by this change, and would like to seek others' views to establish a consensus. The article page already includes various critical assessments, including the album's inclusion in a Core Collection in The Penguin Guide to Jazz, which in itself would indicate a critical view at odds with a Low assessment. I will also note Valerie Wilmer's summary in As serious as your life: "Spiritual Unity, a trio date with Gary Peacock on bass and Sunny Murray on drums, revolutionised the direction for anyone playing those three instruments." - again inconsistent with a low rating. I am opening this topic to seek views on the particular case of the Ayler album, but perhaps the 2010 discussion on Importance ratings should be revisited. AllyD (talk) 09:18, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

I read some of the comments you linked to from ten years ago. You have fallen into several common traps. I understand rank in Wikiproject Jazz to mean how much work an article needs, how soon it is attended to, or other project-related matters. Which is to say, how important it is in relative terms to us, to people who work routinely on the jazz project—not how important it is to Jazz History, the World, or Universal Global Humanity Amen. To my knowledge two people work routinely on the jazz project, EddieHugh and me, and I haven't heard from Eddie in many months. The others do gnome work based on their interests and desires, such as fighting crusades to "save" articles from being deleted or, the other side of the coin, creating articles that are somehow Important to the Cause. The assumption is that working on Wikipedia is morally good. But it has nothing to do with morality. It's simply an encyclopedia, a collection of boring facts. Straying from that reality creates nothing but conflict and a pile of messes that someone else has to clean up.

Rank has nothing to do with inventing an impartial standard by which jazz musicians and jazz albums can be judged. I can't think of a more subjective subject than jazz. The word itself is debated. The word's origins are debated. It is the last subject where you are likely to encounter something like an impartial or objective standard for what is good or bad, better or best. The search for such an iron law, commandment, or divinely inspired biblical text (like New Grove or The Penguin Guide to Jazz) is doomed to fail because there is no such thing and never can be. There are reliable sources and unreliable sources, not perfect sources and imperfect sources. They are all imperfect. Like human beings, they all make mistakes. So what?

Worse, the search for infallible unchanging standards for Wikipedia invites, begs for, opinion, which in turn leads to more conflict and fruitless, irrational debate. We are not here to collect opinions. We are not here to act like parents telling childlike readers what is good and what is bad for them. Readers of jazz articles are not children. They can make up their own minds. Even if you don't believe that, you still must abide by the goals, processes, and rules of Wikipedia. Wikipedia has nothing to do with the expression of opinion, even if it is considered an informed opinion or Authoritative Opinion from the Mount Olympus of Jazz Gods. There are enough talking heads in the world already. There's enough to do on the jazz project at the most foundational, basic level—finding sources for articles, for example, doing the actual writing, the actual work of Wikipedia, or, God help us, using the comma correctly, as opposed to slapping on templates and creating endless stubs for groundlings to take care of, and debating and debating and debating. Words, words, words, according to the melancholy Dane. Just one more tale full of sound of fury, signifying nothing.
Vmavanti (talk) 16:37, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

• Returning to the question at hand, this is how Template:Importance scheme defines these ratings. Top: "Subject is extremely important, even crucial, to its specific field. Reserved for subjects that have achieved international notability within their field."; Low: "Subject is not particularly notable or significant even within its field of study. It may only be included to cover a specific part of a notable article". AllyD (talk) 07:55, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

Everything I said is relevant to the question at hand. If you don't understand something, ask.
Vmavanti (talk) 12:54, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

• The Importance ratings were, I think, originally introduced for, and contribute to the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Article selection process. In that sense, what was being sought from this and other projects was a view as to what was important, in this case, then, a judgment relating to "how important it is to Jazz History". It is worth bearing that usage in mind. AllyD (talk) 08:26, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

And I believe it is contrary to the goals and processes and documentation of Wikipedia for the members of a Wikiproject, no matter how many members it has, to decide for a world of 7.5 billion people what is good and what isn't, no matter what the subject. I don't know why Jazz History is capitalized, but those caps really give the game away.
Vmavanti (talk) 12:58, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

By the way, I'm starting to lose my patience with the constant privileging (deferral to, really) of British sources like the Penguin Guide and Oxford University and the Guardian especially when it comes to a thoroughly American subject like jazz on an American web site like Wikipedia. Like jazz, Wikipedia was created by Americans. Let's never forget that.
Vmavanti (talk) 16:42, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

'Class' is how well developed the article is. 'Importance' is how much editing attention/resources we think it warrants. Using Penguin was a way years ago of using a reliable source to determine what would get 'top importance'. There are several ways of attributing 'importance' – how important is Spiritual Unity in the whole of jazz? As a jazz album?... These lead to varying conclusions. 'Importance' as I see it is meant to be a tool to help us direct our efforts. If Spiritual Unity has been 'top' for a decade but remains little changed in that time, then perhaps the tool isn't helping much. (But I still like it to have it.)

On British sources: it's more about what's not behind a paywall or can be obtained easily. Grove (OUP) is accessible via Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library; The Guardian has no paywall (but barely covers jazz these days); lots of people/libraries have a copy of Penguin. Are there US equivalents? Some accessible jazz magazines are from the US, but I find that a lot of stuff published in the US is behind a paywall, syndicated, or local. EddieHugh (talk) 18:58, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

FWIW I think I'd suggested the Penguin ratings mainly because they seemed consistent, if subjective, in their application. Allmusic.com, in contrast, might assign a five-star rating to an album with no accompanying review, or conversely only two- or three-stars where the written review itself was more effusive than the star rating would suggest. At this far remove I can't cite specific examples, but recall seeing this pattern(?) (or absence thereof?) more and more when looking up something or other at allmusic.com. My impression of Allmusic (FWIW) is that someone there was tasked and/or preoccupied with seeing how they could fit music criticism into their database (IIRC the early AMG books' copyright notices ascribed ownership to Matrix, a software company). (Another side effect of this, and I've gone on about it in the archives, was listing numerous, if unlikely, styles of jazz that Allmusic didn't really define themselves, but came (for a while) to define article categorization here at Wikipedia -- e.g. "Early creative".) The earliest edition of the book version of AMG to Jazz (1994) did not have multi-starred ratings. It did have a system of circle- or star-markings, somewhat analagous to Penguin's Crown and Core Collection, respectively, but even in that edition's case there might be an album that was marked but had no accompanying text, or conversely a written review that might suggest a superlative marking but had none. Long story short, by applying Penguin as one criterion for article importance, we were at least deferring to a third party, as opposed to editors equating importance (to Wikipedia) with their personal preferences. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 19:31, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

Eddie: Does everyone have free access to Grove? I mean everyone in the world. Do you know about the Downbeat digital archive? Free pdfs of every issue. I have a pdf of every issue from 2008 to the present. I'm looking at my files now: I have pdfs of Earshot Jazz, JazzBeat (the Jazzology newsletter), JazzInside, JerseyJazz, JazzTimes, The Jazz Rag, and The NYC Jazz Record. You can find some interesting things (of dubious legality) at the Internet Archive if you dig around. Syncopated Times is an interesting site. JazzTimes is a substantive site with a lot of free material and pretty good writers. AllAboutJazz has a lot of free material, but it's promotional and its reviews tend to be written by fans and amateurs. It often uses information from press releases and from musicians' web sites. I wish I had access to all those old Billboard magazines. Google has given us some good snippets.

If it were up to me, no one would use star ratings or numbered reviews. Remove them from Wikipedia, web sites, magazines. How would I rank my collection? Everything I have, I like. If I dislike it that much, I get rid of it. Sure, some I like more than others, but I don't really try to make fine distinctions. That's a mug's game. I don't expect people to like what I like, though of course it sometimes puzzles me. Even having a Core Collection, someone's always going to disagree. Always. There's a problem with trying to objectify what isn't objectifiable. Music isn't 100 percent subjective, but much of it is. I would get rid of the Wikiproject Jazz ranking system that started this thread. I've had to defend it to IP editors, and they rarely get it. It seems to create more problems than it solves. It seems like a waste of time or worse.
Vmavanti (talk) 23:31, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

I have some of those, but you've given me more to look at. I actually have more than I'll ever (be able to) read, but pdfs are easy to search, so I accumulate them anyway. Billboard can be found at worldradiohistory.com, but the search function is poor (I see that whole issues can now be downloaded from there... is there a mass download method...?). EddieHugh (talk) 16:09, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

Interesting site, thanks. I listened to radio a lot when I was kid.
Vmavanti (talk) 22:54, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

Thanks to Eddie and Gyrofrog for their thoughtful replies, for engaging with the subject, and for their real work. These things separate the men from the boys, and we certainly live in a world of children don't we?
Vmavanti (talk) 17:25, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

Musicians who committed suicide categories at CfD

Please see this discussion. Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 08:00, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Merge proposal that may be of interest to folks in this project

• Talk:Stanley Clarke#Merger proposal -J04n(talk page)

Not a national award and arguably not an important award

Stubøprisen.
The prize is not a national award - it is a regional award. (How much more than 300,000 people live in the region, I am not sure of.)

It seems like the winner in 2013 and the winner in 2015 are not wiki-notable; I am fine with those winners being redirected to the article about the prize.

However, the only move I am making for now is to give my support for someone else to get the ball rolling:
Perhaps one should note, on say this discussion page, when consensus is reached that the

• 1989-winner is notable enough to be redirected (to the article about the prize), but not keep the article about the individual artist for now.

1991-winner is notable enough to be redirected, but not keep the article for now.
1993-winner, and 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2017, 2019.

(An alternative might be that someone becomes bold, and redirects one name at a time - redirects to the article about the prize. One could perhaps start doing this around say the 15th of January.)
Note: Do not redirect for any individual who is wiki-notable enough to have one's own article! Regards! 89.8.141.19 (talk) 20:19, 27 December 2020 (UTC)