Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Macabre (album)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. (non-admin closure) Rcsprinter₁₂₃ (interview) 21:18, 25 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Macabre (album)

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The article cites only the self-published liner note for a different topic (an EP release that is from a few years earlier and therefore doesn't mention this topic at all) and a vending site offering a single for sale that is not on this album (but apparently has a B-side that is a rework of something from this album, and alas, saying the single is not currently available for sale on the site). There is no indication of in-depth coverage in reliable sources (or even any coverage at all, even in unreliable sources other than that online shopping site). The article contains various unsourced notes about the subject (such as explaining how certain words are shown in Cyrillic or what certain things mean in Japanese or how some versions of some of the songs are also found on other album releases from the same band), but the article contains no commentary by music critics and no indication that any in-depth coverage exists. —BarrelProof (talk) 23:32, 4 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Music-related deletion discussions. —BarrelProof (talk) 23:32, 4 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Albums and songs-related deletion discussions. —BarrelProof (talk) 23:32, 4 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. So let's see...article quality issues...article quality issues...and more article quality issues. Meanwhile, this shows the album at no. 2 in the Japanese album chart, so it seems exceptionally unlikely that there is no significant coverage in Japanese sources. It's almost certainly notable enough, but unless someone can dig out that coverage we don't have much of a basis for an article. --Michig (talk) 07:40, 5 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Keep or Merge Can we ask ourselves, why is this at Articles for Deletion? This imparts basic information about the release and track listing of a hit album by an obviously notable band. Even the translations are useful to international fans (do we need to provide sources for literal translations?). Most of the things about this article are encyclopedic, and they are verifiable (discographical sources exist for things like the release date, and the track listing is printed in the album - it's catalogue data, like the title page of a printed book). If it is super important that we not have an article for this album because of a lack of third-party commentary, why would we delete it, rather than merge it into a general discography page? (Is that super important? Does it serve the reader interested in this plainly notable topic? Are we NOTINHERITing our nose to spite our face?) This speaks to a much larger problem, I think - Wikipedia's music editors don't know what to do with discographical information, and some of them are flushing a ton of it for reasons I can't defend. Chubbles (talk) 04:54, 7 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- Supported by the WP:GNG guideline, articles should be about topics that are sourced by "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". We shouldn't have articles that are basically only sourced by self-published and promotional content. There should be a difference between what you find on Wikipedia and what you find on the website of a record company or an online music vendor. Unsourced information such as translation comments (or blaming some unnamed censorship board for why a song name uses the words "hypodermic syringe" spelled backwards or asserting that some tune was derived from a particular prior work by someone else or asserting what some title "suggests") might just be from some random person's imagination or vandalism. —BarrelProof (talk) 17:21, 8 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  - The GNG deals with the existence of significant coverage in reliable sources, not the citation of such sources within an article. In this case, being a top 10 album in Japan, it seems highly likely that such coverage exists. Unfortunately, without identifying these sources, not much of the article is verifiable, and it should be possible to cover what's left in the band's discography (if only we could agree a way to include tracklistings within discographies). --Michig (talk) 17:54, 8 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, yes, of course we can cite chapter and verse and follow them to the letter, but I'm asking, does that make a better encyclopedia? It's a letter-versus-spirit of the law question. We can and should, indeed, remove speculative information about censorship boards and such. That I encourage! But it is plainly encyclopedic and of interest to the reader wanting to know more about Dir En Grey to, for instance, tell that reader what songs are contained on their top-selling album and what their English translations are. The content deserves to be here, somewhere, regardless of our hidebound devotion to ensuring it is not in a separate article. The embarrassing thing, I think, is that sometimes we differentiate ourselves from record company or music vendor websites only by refusing to include good, useful, verifiable information that they do provide. Chubbles (talk) 18:52, 8 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Those are good comments, from both you and Michig. I think the only thing I might like to add in response is that I find it annoying to have articles on Wikipedia that provide nothing more than a list of statistics or don't offer any additional perspective that's different from what I would read on the product label or a self-published product website. When I'm looking for information about a topic, I first click on Wikipedia rather than the product-maker's website, because I expect to find more real objective information there (sufficiently more to overcome the usual amount of sloppy editing quality and the insertion of random personal thoughts and opinion and vandalism). —BarrelProof (talk) 19:22, 8 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Certainly, I agree that album articles are always improved by the inclusion of reception history and critical commentary, but I suppose I just want to push back a little on the thought that, in its absence, there is basically nothing left to say. I guess it's a larger conversation than just this AfD, though it gets played out in AfD after AfD and pocket deletion after pocket deletion (i.e., unilateral redirecting without merging content). I've been thinking about ways to get a little more thought from the wider community about the issue, though I am not really an avid policy/guideline wonk. There was an interesting proposal recently at WT:MUSIC that spoke to similar concerns, and I left a tl;dr essay there, but I wonder whether folks from WikiProject Music or who edit in and around WP:MUSIC space might want to come together and think a little harder about how we could better structure discographical content on Wikipedia. Chubbles (talk) 00:27, 9 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 14:06, 11 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Japan-related deletion discussions. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 14:08, 11 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - The biggest problem in trying to comment on this article is that the album was released 17 years ago and there is going to be little on the net. I found a few reviews ([1], [2]). as well as a few articles on a recent tour by the band that was centered on that old album ([3], [4]). Another issue is that Oricon's site doesn't provide rankings that far back ([5]), so it may take a bit to confirm it ranked no. 4 on the album chart (though I found this). Some have complained about the standards used here, but my complaint is that it is just inherently harder to prove notability with an older and a Japanese album. I am sure if we check the many rock magazines printed in Japan, we can find many articles on the album at the time, but none of those are online and not many libraries are going to have them. I personally think this should not be deleted, but I realize it might be hard to convince a skeptic. Michitaro (talk) 11:16, 12 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. The album charted at number 4 on Oricon (the Oricon rankings page is archived on Archive.is: [6]), so we can presume coverage exists. As Michitaro noted, it impossible to find anything online now. (The only hope would be CDJournal, but it doesn't have a review for this one: [7].) --Moscow Connection (talk) 17:16, 15 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Sandstein 09:44, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.