User:C. A. Russell/Thoughts

Here's some thoughts about article authoring.

Corpus
EPs are usually "studio albums", too, so it's wrong to impose that kind of broken dichotomy. See also Talk:Alice in Chains (album)#Jar of Flies.

Footnotes and bad web authoring
Reviews in Template:Album infobox should be templated. Linking to review with "link" as the anchor text is unacceptable; we should use Cite.php here. Done per Wikipedia:WikiProject Albums#Professional reviews. See Template talk:Infobox album/Archive 4#Links to reviews for the discussion.

Globally accessible redirects for songs
Red links are a very rare occurrence today, which is a great improvement from the way things were, say, five years ago. Similarly, in the past two years or so, I've started to notice that the use of redirects has also improved greatly. A few years back, there was an obnoxious proliferation of notices on talk pages that an album was "connected". I don't know what the extent of this effort was, but every album and song should be reachable with a single, predictable query.

Today when I look for a song that isn't a single or otherwise notable, I usually have to visit the discography page, then to the pages for individual records to look through the track listings in order to find the record the song was released on. It happens often enough that I would be against calling this a contrived scenario. If I'm really lucky, the song title is distinct and notable enough that it has its own article with the same title as the song. Indistinct song titles sometimes force me to go through disambiguation pages to get where I want to go. Songs of limited notability may or may not have a blurb on a disambiguation page informing me of the album it was released on. Worst case scenarios are that either the disambiguation page contains no mention of the song, or the song title is distinct enough that it wouldn't be confused with anything else, but no redirect exists.

Here's a breakdown:


 * The phrases "every album" and "each album" refers to the list obtained by cataloguing all albums for which an article exists or is mentioned on an artist's page. Each album should have a redirect at album name (artist album) pointing to the album's article if it exists, or the artist's article if it doesn't. For every album, a disambiguation page should exist at album name (album) listing the albums from the list with a matching name, with the links on that page obeying the same rules as the redirects in album and artist form. The previous sentence notwithstanding, if an album's title is not shared with any other album, no disambiguation page should exist at the given title, but instead a redirect should exist, obeying the same rules as redirects in album and artist form.


 * The phrases "every song" and "each song" refers to the list obtained by taking the the track list for every album on Wikipedia and adding to it all songs which have articles and don't already appear on the list. Each song should have a redirect at song title (artist song) pointing to the song's article if it exists, or the album's page if it doesn't. For every song, a disambiguation page should exist at song title (song) listing the songs from the list with a matching title, with the links on that page obeying the same rules as the redirects in song and artist form. The previous sentence notwithstanding, if a song's title is not shared with any other, no disambiguation page should exist at the given title, but instead a redirect should exist, obeying the same rules as redirects in song and artist form.

Every song should have a redirect located at song title (artist song). This follows the disambiguation conventions and overlaps with many of the article titles already in place, so redirects like Alive (Pearl Jam song) needn't be created, as the article already exists there. It completely sidesteps the disambiguation issue: it doesn't matter whether the article for "Once" is located at Once, Once (song), or Once (Pearl Jam song), because with the lattermost occurrence, there's enough information present to determine where the reader wants to go. Similarly, albums should follow this convention, so the reader doesn't have to determine whether Ten is located at Ten, Ten (album), or Ten (Pearl Jam album).

Graphed sales data
It would be nice to have small, sparkline-like graphs (with legend) for RIAA sales certifications included in album infoboxes. Appropriate metrics for other regional markets should be used for those regions as well.

RIAA's bad use of web forms
The RIAA's music certification search form stupidly uses HTTP POST instead of GET, so there are a lot of pages on Wikipedia that cite the RIAA's search form, instead of the actual results of the search. This requires readers to enter the queries themselves. Instead, you can link to the actual search results by following this form: "http://riaa.com/goldandplatinumdata.php?table=SEARCH_RESULTS&title=Lost+Dogs&artist=Pearl+Jam&perPage=25&go=Search"

Not shown in the Wikipedia search I linked above are the articles that do link to the correct search results, but use a longer form of the URL with unnecessary parameters. For example here's one the Black Sabbath article uses: "http://www.riaa.com/goldandplatinumdata.php?resultpage=1&table=SEARCH_RESULTS&action=&title=black%20sabbath&artist=black%20sabbath&format=&debutLP=&category=&sex=&releaseDate=&requestNo=&type=&level=&label=&company=&certificationDate=&awardDescription=&catalogNo=&aSex=&rec_id=&charField=&gold=&platinum=&multiPlat=&level2=&certDate=&album=&id=&after=&before=&startMonth=1&endMonth=1&startYear=1958&endYear=2009&sort=Artist&perPage=25"

Among other things, this URL uses an  parameter, which when used in conjunction with , by a reasonable guess, probably restricts search results to that range. If that's the case,  is not forward compatible, and greater certifications in subsequent years will not be shown, making it more difficult to keep Wikipedia content up to date.

ASCAP publishing bodies
ASCAP publishing bodies should have appropriate redirects, e.g., Boggy Bottom Publishing redirects to Jerry Cantrell; You Make Me Sick I Make Music redirects to Chris Cornell. Note that these vanity names don't necessarily refer to the band but (usually?) the individual, e.g., both Pearl Jam and Mad Season songs are published under Jumpin' Cat Music for Mike McCready, and some Mad Season and Alice in Chains songs are published under Jack Lord Music for Layne Staley.

Data visualization
Where are the cool data visualization tools that do things like graph edit counts over time for an article?

Piped links
Don't abuse piped links. Before the adoption of Cite.php, blog-style, piped external links were the norm. Now that we have a better means, footnotes are the way to go. It's good for the semantic web.

IPA misuse
As of this writing, the OS X article includes an excerpt that reads "pronounced /mæk oʊ ɛs tɛn/ ". I've seen similar instances of IPA in other articles. This demonstrates how one of the very things that IPA was designed for&mdash;unambiguous representation of phonemes, regardless of dialect or accent&mdash;renders it unsuitable for this kind of use.

Radices and numbers
There is no such thing as a "binary number" or a "decimal number". The conflation of numbers and their symbolic representation (that is, the numeral system used to write them) is difficult enough to pose a barrier for some students. Wikipedia articles shouldn't encourage this habit.

Missing the forest for the trees
This is a common occurrence, although I'm not sure "missing the forest for the trees" is quite the correct phrase to use, since it has a slightly different connotation. People tend to become so used to the auxiliary details of a greater concept that they tend to link the two and treat absence of the auxiliary details as the absence of the greater concept. In fact, sometimes "fixing" the absence of the auxiliary details tends to have ramifications exactly counter to the greater concept. Don't be misled by auxiliary details.