Talk:Santa Clara Vanguard Drum and Bugle Corps

Copyright problem removed
Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: https://www.scvanguard.org/history/view.cfm?uid=13f5a299-17ba-4ea7-b78d-1918f595c786 (that they predate is evidenced by the archived version of the page from October 2007). Infringing material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Moonriddengirl (talk) 21:29, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Dmitres campaign against drum corps musical bibiolographical information?
Why are you deleting information about drum corps shows that has been created over years and years of time? I see that you changed Blue Devils and Colts and SCV. I reverted the BD page and someone else caught you on the Colts and SCV page. Please explain yourself. Apparently, the terms means generally, "I don't like this"... there are citations to these materials. If you know Drum Corps however, you would understand that these sources are not commonly available, and built through community efforts. Drum Corps seasons are brief, only about three months per year. The show music is kept secret for months so as to avoid detection among competitors, like football plays. Then, once shows are over, they are not easy to find again.

Drum corps are all non-profits, as is their organizing body. They do not break even and require annual donations in order to stay afloat. Their instructors often work for free for the love of the performances, and are band instructors and former members.

So what is the value in deleting years and even decades of information here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not/Unencyclopedic — Preceding unsigned comment added by Saltwolf (talk • contribs)


 * Maybe it's time to bring this to talk. Your edit summary for this edit said the section you were removing was unsourced. However there was a citation (to "DCX: The Drum Corps Xperience") attached to that section. Do you think that source isn't reliable for the purposes of verifying the information in that section? (FWIW, I'm pretty sympathetic to your cuts, but since this is leading to some contentious back-and-forth edits, maybe it's worth being a little clearer about the underlying policy issues.) Colin M (talk) 18:18, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Colin M--thanks. Well, the thing is this: if there are no secondary sources, is it worth mentioning? I understand that the bugle corps lovers think it is, but that's another matter. Plus, it's a huge amount of content, and typically dwarfs the rest of the article (keeping in mind also that the "History" sections in these articles are overwhelmingly detailed and woefully undersourced. And the "Caption Awards" are unsourced as well--I presume they might could be sourced to that same website, but that doesn't make it much better. The larger issue is that this pertains to ALL these articles. All of them seem to have been edited by COI editors, or lovers of this cultural phenomenon with more love than knowledge of Wikipedia. Did you see that all of them had links to the organization, that DCI? What I would like to see is a concerted effort on behalf of knowledgeable editors to adhere to our guidelines, to prune these History sections and verify them more properly (not just to the DCX website, which is related to DCI?). And I see a bigger problem now: our text and this are identical. If this went the same way with other articles, they will ALL need to be purged, because it says "Copyright © 2017-2021 Modotech" right there at the bottom. I gotta run (sorry) so I can't look deeper into dates and things, but I am going to ping, who knows a lot about copyright. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 20:25, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
 * From what I can tell it seems the DCX website is independent of the DCI organization. So I think it is secondary. The "reliable" part is a little more fuzzy. Seems like it's basically a blog. So I would be inclined to treat it as unreliable unless there's coverage in reliable sources that establish the authors as subject matter experts. I agree with you on the larger issue of the article being very long and very detailed relative to the sourcing. As for copyright, it's not clear to me whether a list like that meets the threshold of originality to be eligible for copyright. Colin M (talk) 20:37, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
 * There's not just a list at http://www.dcxmuseum.org/index.cfm?view=corpslist&Corpsid=3. Click on the tab that says "History" to view the text that Drmies is talking about. Some of the same prose has been at LastFM since 2011, under a compatible CC-by license. Because the page http://www.dcxmuseum.org/index.cfm?view=corpslist&Corpsid=3 does not seem to have been properly archived at the Wayback Machine it's hard to say for sure, but the document may have been created in 2017. The bulk of our version was added in 2012. Result: inconclusive on the copyright issue.— Diannaa (talk) 21:05, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
 * On the subject of whether performances need to be covered in such loving detail, I looked at List of The Rolling Stones concert tours. Pretty bald, but the more notable tours have their own articles, complete with set lists, and God help us, the tour physiotherapist: Steel_Wheels/Urban_Jungle_Tour. But it's got 18 references, and it's the Rolling Effing Stones. Compare to a regional band, the Dixie Dregs, who certainly toured, but lack such extremely detailed coverage of individual performances, despite much better sourcing than is available for the corps articles. Acroterion   (talk)   23:21, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
 * This isn't really an apt comparison in the context in which this group exists in my opinion. The material in this list is far more akin to a page such as List of Buffalo Sabres seasons than it is to a list of concert tours for a non-competitive artist considering this is a record of the competitive results of a group that exists for the sake of competition. If you want to draw a more similar comparison to something that exists at the intersection of arts and competition, perhaps an infobox regarding awards won as exists for movies would be more suitable? This could get equally messy though for groups who have won a significant number of awards over the years. NathanGlugla (talk) 23:33, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I didn't really nmean it as an apt comparison, I was mainly looking for a place where such detail existed in another context.  Acroterion   (talk)   23:42, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
 * A better parallel could be found with the Ohio State University Marching Band. I would prefer not to directly compare articles with others, since we're trying to improve all articles to a high standards, but that effort stops well short of including everything we possibly can in an encyclopedia article.  Acroterion   (talk)   23:47, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't really find that to be a better parallel since while the activity is the same, the fundamental nature of the group is not and the context in which it exists is not. Year to year differences are not super meaningful for TOSUMB and the article reflects that; it focuses largely on traditions and history as you would expect. However, across Wikipedia it is almost universally true that competitive organizations and athletes have some way of tabulating their results either listed in the main article or in a companion "list of ____ seasons" page. Now the fact that this crucial difference isn't conveyed in the article to a sufficient standard that this conversation is necessary is in and of itself a glaring indictment of the quality of the article as it currently stands, but I think it makes much more sense to treat these articles in a similar way to sports teams or athletes or chess players and the like than it does to look for parallels specifically in the music world to judge what does and does not merit inclusion because of the purely competitive nature of their existence. NathanGlugla (talk) 23:58, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I would tend to agree that athletics might provide a better model for documentation of this sort of competitive organization. With that said, we specifically deprecate play-by-play coverage of individual games, and records are summarized for most circumstances. To keep using Ohio State for now, the football team articles are illustrative: Ohio State Buckeyes football and List of Ohio State Buckeyes football seasons  Acroterion   (talk)   00:12, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm struggling to see the key differences between the information that was documented here and the Ohio State individual seasons page. This wasn't a play-by-play of each given season, each of these groups competes at upwards of 30 contests in a given season with the same repertoire. What was recorded here was their final score and their overall ranking for the year as well as the repertoire and show title for the whole season which seems to me to be a basic summation of the essential facts of the season without being particularly superfluous, perhaps you could highlight specifically what it is that you thought was over documented in the list as it previously existed? NathanGlugla (talk) 00:28, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Why would the article include much more than first place wins (or at most win, place and show) in national competitions, without themes and repertoires? Granting basic notability to be substantiated in the absence of much other coverage by wins in national competitions, that's not a license for every possible nuance, narrowly sourced to a single place that already covers it all in great detail anyway. We're not compiling knowledge from a spectrum of independent sources, we're quoting more or less from a single source that is apparently the only repository. To quote from WP:FANCRUFT, "the article is a compilation of facts that reliable sources outside of fan-based reliable sources have not found interesting enough to publish." Which goes back to RS and notability. See my earlier summary comment below.  Acroterion   (talk)   00:49, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
 * For the same reasons that the season summaries and competitive history for any team or competitor aren't limited to only the seasons in which they won: the competitive history of a group/person who is notable for being a participant in a competition is a notable attribute of that group or person. The Ohio State Seasons history page isn't only inclusive of Bowl Games that they won, why would this be different? Scores themselves for these seasons can be (with some difficulty admittedly) pulled from multiple non-primary sources, though the quality of those sources goes up dramatically for recent years, and while the Fancruft conversation is one that definitely needs to be had pertaining to the corps articles as a whole, it seems like this is an oddly high standard to set specifically for the typical results summary included with an athlete or team, especially since one cited source is one more than most results summaries currently seem to have. I could definitely get behind a pared-down version of this where repertoires are left as an external link at the bottom and not included as a part of the table as a whole though since this would bring the size of the table down to something more manageable. NathanGlugla (talk) 01:24, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
 * The point is a pared-down discussion, starting with fancruft and ending with whether we need a year-by-year account of events in which the organization had no notable success. This isn't NCAA Division I sports, to return to an earlier parallel.  Acroterion   (talk)   12:01, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Sure, but it also isn't Tier III Junior Ice Hockey or a random baseball league that only existed for a few years in Texas and yet the articles for teams in those leagues contain season by season records without contention if they have been added (United Baseball League, NA3HL) It seems that the decision to challenge the notability of specifically the competitive record of a team/athlete is almost entirely without precedent on Wikipedia. If there's counter-examples to this I'd be happy to look at them, but it seems to me that the application of the GNG and the question of Fancruft pertain far, far more to the actual written content of the article and not the boilerplate summary of competitive records which is a standard part of articles covering competitive entities. NathanGlugla (talk) 14:30, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I have trouble with the idea that there needs to be such excruciating detail applied to individual performances by what is mainly a local organization, and narrowly sourced at that. These articles seem to form a walled garden, whose detailed material belongs on a Fandom wiki, where sourcing isn't important. I'll ignore the whole notability issue, since I would prefer that notability be applied as broadly as we can manage consistent with sourcing.  Acroterion   (talk)   23:21, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Merger proposal
I propose merging Vanguard Cadets Drum and Bugle Corps into Santa Clara Vanguard Drum and Bugle Corps. The Vanguard Cadets are a feeder corps for SVC, just as the articles for Blue Devils B and C have been merged to the Blue Devils article. Bgsu98 (talk) 02:07, 6 July 2022 (UTC)