Talk:Music of The Lord of the Rings film series

Original Research
Ah. I can see that a huge amount of work has gone into this article, and that someone has rated it as a "B", and that it contains much useful information, so I'm sorry to have to address this. The article is in large measure uncited or inadequately cited, and contains a substantial amount of material which goes far beyond what in a book article would be valid "plot description" (which doesn't usually need to be cited other than to the primary source). The section on "Principal leitmotifs", for instance contains more than 9000 words, far beyond what could reasonably be expected. Further, much of it is both uncited and full of opinion, and it is sometimes quite technical as well. That combination is Original Research, perhaps implying editorial opinion, or perhaps (given various mentions of Twitter as a medium by which the material was gathered from the production team) some unascertained combination of possible copyright violation, unattributed material, and inadequate citation.

Aside from the WP:OR question, the article as a whole is unreadably long at 165,000 bytes - an informal guide would be that we should not expect readers to cope with much over 100,000 and even that is for exceptionally big topics. The cure for that is simply vigorous copy-editing, preserving reliably-sourced material but cutting it down to "summary style", and boldly removing any uncited or apparently editorial material, and anything which might be a copyright violation.

In short, this article as it currently stands is very close to bringing Wikipedia into disrepute. It would require a large number of citations to reliable sources to bring it into like with policy (let alone to justify its "B" rating), and it is not at all obvious that such sources exist as we can't cite this sort of thing to Twitter or similar platforms, nor should we be writing anyone's opinions in Wikipedia's voice. The immediate solution must therefore be to cut down anything in the article that states an opinion without attributing it to a named and cited source. Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:05, 17 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Well, I see nobody has commented on this, and I've been busy on other things, but in the meanwhile the article has acquired a "More citations needed" tag (in July 2022), which it would be hard to disagree with: and that is despite the fact that the article has 97 citations and 88 (largely uncited) explanatory notes. How could all that be true? Well, a *large* amount of the material is apparently a paraphrase - should that be "a plagiarism", I wonder - of Doug Adams's The Music of The Lord of the Rings Films, basically almost entirely without citing the book inline and certainly without specific page references. This is certainly poor practice; I think a copyright lawyer could quite easily make a meal of it, and call it unjustified copying. There is a second problem: it grossly unbalances the article, indeed the thing is floating belly-up in the water - I just added a "Reception" section with a brief bit of criticism: the only bit anywhere in the article - while the whole of the rest of it is vastly over-detailed musicological analysis a la Adams, at absurd length, with almost nothing on whether it works, what other people think, and barely anything in the way of reliable independent sources about the music as such. To give just one example of what's wrong, the promisingly-named "Documentation" section is ... you guessed it, entirely undocumented: I shall delete it now. In short, it's currently nothing like what a Wikipedia article is meant to be. Given that nobody has objected, and at least somebody has voiced agreement by tagging the article for citations, I shall start the necessary surgery now. Anyone who wants to help by finding books and journal articles that reliably discuss the music is welcome to join in. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:25, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

GA review
just noting here that I'd like to try a GA review of this article in the next few days, probably this weekend (I'll need to free up a good half day or so when I next get time), unless of course someone else wants to have a go and beats me to it before then, well that's fine! Cheers — Jon (talk) 00:33, 13 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Many thanks, that'll be great. Chiswick Chap (talk) 02:34, 13 March 2023 (UTC)