Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of best-selling singles


 * 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   keep. SilkTork's argument (which was not rebutted) provides the most clear and concise explanation as to why this is not SYNTH. postdlf (talk) 18:29, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

List of best-selling singles

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WP:SYNTH says, "Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources." The sales figures for these songs are certainly useful info and absolutely belong in articles pertaining to the respective songs. However, to take information from various sources that mostly pertains to individual songs, not best-selling singles as a collective group, and compile our own list of best-selling singles, certainly seems like a SYNTH violation.

Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. "Merely being true, or even verifiable, does not automatically make something suitable for inclusion in the encyclopedia. To provide encyclopedic value, data should be put in context with explanations referenced to independent sources." –Chase (talk / contribs) 23:08, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep WP:SYNTH is irrelevant to our maintenance of lists. The relevant guideline is WP:LISTN and this list obviously passes this because best-selling singles are routinely considered as a group in charts of top singles for the week, year or all-time.  Andrew D. (talk) 23:44, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
 * If a reliable publication posted a list of the best-selling singles of all time globally, you might have a point. Lists of best-selling singles are often published, but they are usually by country. Most of the songs on this list, particularly recent additions, have not been discussed as part of a group of best-selling singles in outside sources. –Chase (talk / contribs) 00:54, 1 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Further, LISTN is part of a guideline, while SYNTH is part of a policy. –Chase (talk / contribs) 00:55, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Albums and songs-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:53, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:53, 1 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep. This is not an example of original synthesis.  The Blue Canoe  17:27, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I currently have mixed thoughts, tending toward the opinion that this article has extremely serious problems as it's currently written, making it more like a collection of indiscriminate information than an actual encyclopedic article about its supposed topic. I don't feel that the article's main contents – very high-selling singles alongside their combined sales figures – are violating SYNTH; as explained in WP:What SYNTH is not, "summarization [of numeric data] by sum, average, etc. ... should not be confused with original research." The sales sum accompanying each single's entry in the list, then, is pretty clearly fair game. However, the contention of this article is that all these singles, having reached the (as far as I can tell completely arbitrary) cutoff of 5 million copies sold worldwide, are among the very best-selling singles of all time. This is increasingly difficult to believe, especially now that the article is mainly populated by fairly but not astonishingly high-selling singles from the digital era, during which singles sales have been extremely high, especially since the late '00s. As Chase correctly notes and as I noted in the talk page to justify the deletion of the "list of artists with most best-selling singles" section, the vast majority of this article is not based on comprehensive reports centered on the question of which singles are among the world's best sellers. Indeed, of all the sources cited here, only a few – Joseph Murrells's The Book of Golden Discs: The Records That Sold a Million (which was published in 1978[!]), some random blog post from "listzblog.com" (almost certainly not a reliable source – its writing style actually suggests that its text was plagiarized from Wikipedia articles), and the IFPI year-end digital reports going back to 2007 – offer anything resembling a comprehensive survey of worldwide best-selling singles, and all are very restricted to certain time periods. The vast majority of the article, then, consists of what editors of widely different interests across Wikipedia happened to have bothered to add to the article upon noting that a single by an act whose page they were editing had certifications or sales figures summing up to over 5 million. Considering that ALL of the worldwide top ten best-selling singles (as stated in IFPI's reports) for the past seven years have sold WELL over 5 million each, it probably isn't a stretch to say that reaching this arbitrary threshold of 5 million is actually achieved fairly commonly in recent years, and that the piecemeal manner by which this article has been built likely fails to include a very significant number of singles that qualify by this (again arbitrary) standard.  It therefore seems incredibly risky, if not outright irresponsible, to conclude that all the singles that have been listed here are certainly among the best-selling singles of all time; this in particular seems to be the kind of false conclusion (4 million in the USA[ref 1] + 1 million elsewhere[ref 2] = ONE OF HISTORY'S BEST-SELLERS!!) that violates SYNTH. Even more worryingly, I often notice that articles for singles that are listed here include claims that they are among the best-selling singles ever, with only a wikilink to this page as support for that contention. I believe this article could be useful and suitably encyclopedic if it can be radically revised to ensure that only singles that are without a doubt among history's best-sellers are included. This would involve carefully reaching consensus on an appropriate threshold (or thresholds, if editors believe different eras should be treated differently) based on the few available sources that treat the subject of worldwide best-sellers comprehensively (the Murrell book and the IFPI reports), not the arbitrarily-selected 5 million. Furthermore, it should be ensured that available sources out there have enough information to make the list of singles qualifying for that threshold as complete as possible. Unless this can be achieved (and perhaps it cannot), I think the article should be deleted. Mmrsofgreen (talk) 07:01, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
 * You summed this up quite nicely, Mmrsofgreen. My SYNTH point was not in regards to the sales figures, but of including songs not discussed as part of a group of best-selling singles in this list. It is telling that there are very few sources here that are actually relevant to a group of best-selling singles, and not just the stats for any song that has sold a certain amount. –Chase (talk / contribs) 18:45, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I see that now that I reread the original nomination. Thank you for clarifying. I do agree that it's worrying that very few of the singles listed here (arguably just the two sourced by Guinness World Records) are actually discussed in the context of all-time worldwide best-sellers. All other sources that address worldwide best-sellers either do so just for one particular year or are hopelessly out of date, so I find myself doubting whether an appropriate criterion for when editors call a single 'all-time best-selling' can even be established, since such a criterion should ideally not be made up by Wikipedians but instead be derived from a reliable source addressing the topic explicitly. (And I'd argue that 5 million is certainly far too low, given just how many singles qualify.) As a "List of five-million-selling singles," this article would be more-or-less fine, although the article's subject would rightly be criticized for being non-notable and arbitrary. However, as a "List of best-selling singles" that purports to be documenting the best-selling singles in the history of commercial music, it is very poor. (For other editors' consideration, an example of an all-time best-selling singles article that is adequately sourced, see List of best-selling singles in the United Kingdom; the starting-point of this article is the Official Charts Company's comprehensive treatment of the topic.) Mmrsofgreen (talk) 23:18, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

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 * Keep. Topic is valid. Concerns about sourcing and/or presentation of material are standard for all articles, and are resolved by discussion and/or editing. As regards Synth: When compiling lists or articles, editors organise the material alphabetically, chronologically, thematically, by size, shape, colour, mode of operation, etc. This is part and parcel of the everyday editing process. If we deleted every article which has organised material into some semblance of order then we'd have very few articles left. If we have a reliable source which says X has 1 million sales, Y has 2 million sales, and Z has 3 million sales, then placing X, Y, and Z into sales order in an article is not just valid, but a very helpful thing to do. This is not Synth, this is everyday editing.  SilkTork  ✔Tea time  09:59, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep MiewEN (talk) 18:37, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Polling is not a substitute for discussion. In deletion discussions, editors are encouraged to state why they think an article should be kept or deleted. –Chase (talk / contribs) 18:41, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
 * For I don't agree with the article's nomination for deletion and do rather appreciate the work as whole which has been built for a decade so far, simple as that. There is a number of Wikipedia maintenance templates you can use instead or improve the article yourself, not chasing nominations for its deletion. Sorry to disappoint you as well. MiewEN (talk) 21:33, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Whether the work is appreciated or even valuable is not the issue here. I believe the work in this article is very valuable, but I doubt very strongly, based on Wikipedia's rules and guidelines, whether it is sourced adequately to belong here. To me, for reasons I've outlined above, this article/project seems more appropriate for an online music forum or fan site than for Wikipedia. Furthermore, that the article has been here for a long time does not exempt it from being considered for deletion. From 2005 until nearly 2009, Wikipedia used to have an article for the United World Chart, a non-notable chart compiled by hobbyists under the name Media Traffic, plus many articles for lists of that chart's "number one hits." (Incidentally, that project is also a piecemeal-compiled chart that purports to contextualize/rank worldwide record sales performance.) These were all (rightly) deleted following nomination and discussion despite half of the editors who chimed in being reluctant and opposed to having the page deleted. I'm not convinced any of Wikipedia's available templates and so on could mitigate this article's most serious and pressing issues, which are chiefly based in whether an acceptable article about this topic can be written given the rarity of reliable sources explicitly addressing the topic of the article. Looking at the history of the article, it appears this has been an issue ever since it was created in 2006. Mmrsofgreen (talk) 23:18, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
 * To me, the value of the article is just the issue when it comes to its nomination for deletion in the first place, and that's what makes our decisions also different. Seems like you’re writing a book, though. Guess I know the ending and that's what makes us different too. Thanks for respecting that. MiewEN (talk) 02:47, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Erm, nope. When someone nominates an article for deletion, the issues raised by the person who nominated the article are those that are in dispute, not the non-issues that other people want to pretend are the issues to make its nomination easier to dismiss. The value of an article with this topic was not disputed in the nomination. Our main difference appears to be that you feel terse snark is a suitable stand-in for discussion. Mmrsofgreen (talk) 19:09, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
 * In dispute is the nomination as such, so face that matter of fact without repeating oponents as evident what issues (should) have been raised here instead. Some of us don't support deletion of articles for one-purpose reason that can be handled otherwise. End of the story. MiewEN (talk) 22:05, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

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 * Strong Keep - This list is obviously eligible for inclusion in an encyclopedia dedicated to provide readers what they are going to be looking for. This article has been viewed 42565 times in the last month. Its deletion would certainly be of great loss to an encyclopedia. If you are looking for the best-selling singles, you are not going to know which song article to look at. You wuld certainly like an encyclopedically formatted list. The argument you wrote can literally be used to delete every musical discography article. But they are definitely notable. A list of reliably sourced encyclopedic content. MaRAno '' FAN 17:12, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
 * The notability of the topic is not the issue raised by the nomination. The popularity of the article and whether a resource about this topic can be found elsewhere are also irrelevant. (Actually, if there is no reliable source about this topic elsewhere, the article probably SHOULDN'T be on Wikipedia!) The argument set forth in the nomination could not be used to argue for the deletion of any discography article because those articles are appropriately sourced and do not assert conclusions not indicated by any of the cited sources. Mmrsofgreen (talk) 19:09, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
 * 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.