Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of recordings of compositions by César Franck (2nd nomination)


 * 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 Delete. Fram (talk) 13:06, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

List of recordings of compositions by César Franck
AfDs for this article: 
 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

"This list is incomplete", it says. True. It's also exactly as incomplete as it was when we decided to "keep and expand" over a year ago. As so often with "keep and fix", only the first has been done. There are two main problems for me here: first, it can't be anything else without including huge numbers of substandard and / or critically ignored (read: unsourced from reliable sources) recordings. Second, it's an arbitrary list. What is special or noteworthy about recordings of Franck? If I want the very best recording of any particular work of Franck then I'll go to the BBC CD Review website, sure, we could copy that here, but it would violate copyright. In the absence of objective criteria for selection, and incidentally I do think most of those listed are very good, I odn't see how we can have this article. Guy (Help!) 15:35, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete per Guy as listcruft. This kind of thing is more World-Cat than Wikipedia. Eusebeus (talk) 17:31, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete. This is miscellaneous information that is inappropriate for our project. We have List of compositions by César Franck to cover the discography requirements, and there is César Franck within the article, whose existence I'll leave to the judgement of that article's editors and WikiProject Classical music. --Dhartung | Talk 19:57, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete. Agree with everything above -- except I wouldn't say that the BBC website is the best source for CD recommendations :) Grover cleveland (talk) 21:46, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep or Merge with List of compositions by César Franck. Per WP:NOEFFORT the fact that this list has not been improved recently is an inappropriate reason to support deletion of an article. As for “listcruft,” that’s a pretty vague reason to delete to isn’t it? This is hardly a random collection of information. Many composers have discographies on Wikipedia. Whether this information requires a separate article is open to debate, but I don’t see any convincing reason why this should be deleted. --S.dedalus (talk) 05:08, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
 * It's not that it hasn't been improved recently, it's that after a "keep and improve" AfD it has not been improved at all, in over a year. In other words, this personal list of recordings with no cited authorities clearly does not get enough inetrest to become compliant with policy. Guy (Help!) 11:24, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Agreed. In general I think discographies on Wikipedia are a great idea.  There are a multitude of reliable sources that can be used (catalogs, other reference works, liner notes to the recordings themselves, etc.).  However this discography is ridiculously incomplete.  I can go to a single web page and find no fewer than 722 recordings of Franck's music!  Is there any realistic prospect that this list will ever contain anything close to that number of entries?   Is there any realistic prospect that it will ever contain even 100 entries?  The discrepancy between the stated aim of this article and its actual content is so extreme as to be ridiculous.  If we allow this list to remain, then why not start articles on List of recordings of compositions by French composers or List of recordings of compositions from the 19th century.  Where do we draw the line? Grover cleveland (talk) 00:01, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * That’s a large but not particularly unreasonable number of recordings when you consider that each recording takes up only one line in the article. List of compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven has more than that many entries. Since we’re not in the business of being a crystal ball here I don’t think any of us can predict whether or not this article will be complete in the near future. Until it is I suggest we simply make a note in the introduction that the page is not yet complete. As for where to draw the line, your sarcastic suggestions are totally non-relevant. This is hardly a slippery slope, just a discography. --S.dedalus (talk) 01:41, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * List of compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven has [a very large number of] entries. Exactly. List of compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven is actually a useful article which (as far as I can tell from a quick glance) is reasonably complete. According to my estimate, it has around seven hundred items. Now, for the current article to be anywhere near complete, it ought to be significantly larger! Whereas instead, after almost two years and surviving one AfD, it has a grand total of 23, which is the entire point. Grover cleveland (talk) 01:56, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * When is the deadline? --S.dedalus (talk) 02:01, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * There is no deadline --S.dedalus (talk) 22:38, 2 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Keep Keep and expand means it was satisfactory, and we were advising to build on it yet further. if this hasnt been done yet, its none the worse than it was before. We do not delete article for being not worked on. Rather than nominate it, it would have been more useful to try to complete it. You are arguing simultaneously that it should be deleted because it isnt complete, and also that it is better that it not be complete. In any case, how complete it should be is an editing question. DGG (talk) 09:25, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep and expand works once, IMO. If it's kept and not expanded and not referenced and no objective inclusion criteria added, then it can't be kept forever.  Eventualism is fine until we find that "eventually" is functionally equivalent to "never".  Unreferenced arbitrary personal opinion has no place on Wikipedia. Guy (Help!) 11:22, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
 * It might be relevant that the vote for "keep and expand" on the first AfD was razor-thin: 3 deletes, 3 keeps and 1 "week keep".  So there was hardly a consensus that "it was satisfactory" the first time.Grover cleveland (talk)  —Preceding comment was added at 18:36, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Nominations do not carry over since consensus can change. --S.dedalus (talk) 01:47, 3 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom and Dhartung. We could take all the time in the world expanding this, but it wouldn't change the POV and "crufty" nature of the underlying concept.  Sing  Cal  20:18, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Okay, how exactly is this POV? I don’t understand how you came to that conclusion. As for this being “listcruft” the article really does not appear to fall under any definition of that word at WP:LISTCRUFT. List of songs that contain the laughter of children, that’s certainly listcruft, but a discography for an extremely notable composer? I don’t think so. --S.dedalus (talk) 22:31, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Why that composer? What are the selection criteria?  How do we define which works or recordings should be covered? Guy (Help!) 23:39, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Because someone decided to create this article. The fact that not all other important composers have discographys doesn’t make this one less important. (WP:ALLORNOTHING) It’s not inconceivable that this list could one day be complete. There are other examples of this on Wikipedia. List of recordings by Plácido Domingo for instance. --S.dedalus (talk) 01:24, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Your Placido Domingo analogy isn't really the same; Placido Domingo will make a finite number of recordings in his lifetime, just like Franck wrote a finite number of compositions. But how many times has Franck's d minor Symphony been recorded? How do we decide which of those 200+ recordings should go on the list? And what about every single one of his other works? It's POV because ultimately an editor has to decide without the help of a reliable source which recordings go on the list and which don't; I doubt that WP:N and WP:MUSIC will help much with that sorting either. The alternative is to put every Franck recording in the list that's been put out by any classical label, English-speaking or otherwise. So, like I said: it's either going to be biased or it's going to be an indiscriminate info-dump, rendering it cruft.  Sing  Cal  03:39, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Okay, fair point. But see my reply to Grover cleveland further up the page. I don’t see why a third option is unreasonable. How about a well referenced list of all known commercial recordings of his music? --S.dedalus (talk) 04:18, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree with S. dedalus that a "well referenced list of all known commercial recordings of his music" would be a great idea. If, in the future, some discographical enthusiast comes along and wants to create a Wikipedia page that contains such a list, I would be cheering him or her on.  However, the current article, after two years and one "keep and expand" AfD, is less than 3% of the way towards that goal.  What we have right now is so pathetic that it's an embarrassment to Wikipedia.  Just because someone created a list, and because it theoretically could become complete, doesn't mean we have to keep it. Grover cleveland (talk) 06:05, 3 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Delete --Dr. Friendly (talk) 18:51, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete. List of compositions by César Franck is an encyclopedic list, but a list of recordings of these compositions is not. Quale (talk) 19:29, 6 March 2008 (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.