Wikipedia:Peer review/User:TUF-KAT/Folk music by country/archive1

User:TUF-KAT/Folk music by country
Ignore the subpage title, when this goes live, it will be a list of folk music traditions divided by region (more or less along the same divisions there are now in the subheadings, so e.g. list of folk music traditions in South Asia, list of folk music traditions in East Africa). A couple concerns: Tuf-Kat 02:22, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) Is the lead bit okay?
 * 2) Structure: Nobody disputes that it may be useful to examine musics in the context of "folk" vs "popular" vs "classical". However, there is no agreement on what exactly constitutes folk music.  Nobody disputes that "folk music" means something in relation to both the music of Turkey and Indigenous Australian music; however, it doesn't necessarily mean the same thing in both contexts, and a definition that covered both might make little sense when applied to Japan or Ethiopia or Mexico.  To make things more confusing, the idea of a discrete "folk music tradition" is mostly a myth (one could argue about odd cases like Pygmy music, probably).  To take the example of US music, for example: no one would argue that Hawaiian folk music does not constitute a distinct tradition, and no one would argue about whether Cajun/Creole is a distinct tradition, though some would and would not combine and separate Cajun and Creole.  Similarly, even excepting the unusual bits like Tejano and Cajun music, the idea of an "American tradition" is probably unsupported; at the very least, African American music should be distinct, and including that one without some white people traditions would be inappropriate.  It would also be inappropriate to have a single tradition for all white folk.  However but... a "French-American" and "German-American" would be redundant and difficult to maintain with the main listing of "French" and "German" under "Europe", and would presumably set the precedent that every country with a distinct ethnic population from another country needs to have that listed as a tradition, which would bloat this beyond manageability.  ("Appalachian music" is very commonly perceived as a distinct (white) folk tradition, and is thus included, but it does not follow that geographic divisions are helpful here; we can't group white musics as "Western US" and "Southern US") I have solved this problem to my satisfaction by foisting the issue on the sources I use; I only include those divisions that are thus divided (in a folk music context) by a reputable source.  Unfortunately, this plan somewhat broke down because most sources don't precisely set out and say what they consider to be a distinct folk tradition, so I've had to exercise some editorial judgement.  (sorry for this long-winded bullet)
 * 3) Some stuff, for example bluegrass, is pretty undebateably not folk music in a scholarly sense, but is commonly perceived that way. In any case where the folk classification is disputable, I've inserted a footnoe explaining it.
 * 4) Now that I've gone a good bit into it, it occurs to me that it might make sense for "Theatre" to be a distinct column. In many traditions, theatre and music are just as closely linked as dance and music, even if that seems odd to us Westerners who most closely associate musical theatre with popular Broadway and the like.  (e.g. Vietnamese water puppetry) Any thoughts on this?
 * 5) I just added the image galleries. Do you like them?  I thought about putting them in a separate column, meaning that every tradition would have a single photo, but decided not to because most of them would not have photos available for a long time to come, and it would be terribly difficult to find a photo that could be said to indisputably represent a tradition of folk music.


 * Your references are impressive, so anyone making a complaint with the choice of what qualifies as "folk" music, or what groups should be separated up, will have a good battle ahead of them. As for theater, I would leave it aside for now or incorporate it into the "dance" column, changing that to "complementary arts" or something similar. Having a column for dance specifically but not for other accompaniments to folk music is a little quirky. The lead might want a paragraph break at "These traditions" but otherwise it is sensible. Only the style of the tables leaves something to be desired-- I think perhaps adapting the standard infobox style, with a standard width for each column, might make it look a little prettier. Excellent work! Ashibaka tock 14:01, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the comments. I've fixed the column widths, I think, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean.  Let me know. Tuf-Kat 23:31, 26 March 2006 (UTC)


 * It's true that theatre and music are closely linked, but I'm not sure that you can truly separate any part of folk culture from the rest. Folk music is in many cases tied to folk literature (the Akyns, for example) and folk religion (a million examples.) It may work best to have just one column to cover all of these, I'm not sure.


 * The images are nice, but I'm not sure about the current format. They may look better when the articles are split off (that's what you're intending to do, yes?) Also, a lot of the links don't point to where they should - usually either to a disambiguation page or a page on an entirely different topic. But it's a fascinating article. If there's anything I can do to help on this (or other similar stuff) I'd be glad to. --Cherry blossom tree 22:54, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I think I've decided there's no reason to separate theatre because, unlike dance, not every tradition will have an entry (most won't, I think), plus as you mention, that would beg the question of folk literature and religion and such, all of which intersect with music. Dance is really the only constant (AFAIK all folk cultures dance).  I'm aware a lot of the links don't work now -- my plan is to try and expand and get somewhere near completion and then work on that... There will be another issue to resolve at that time: does every variety of an instrument need a specific article?  Is it POV to link to bagpipe for an African tradition but sackpipa for Sweden?  Any thoughts?  I would say we could have an article on every instrument in every tradition, thus we oughtn't have any links to bagpipe itself, but I'm not sure...
 * Yes, I'm planning on splitting the pages up by region, which will probably make the pictures more attractive. They're not strictly necessary, so I'll remove them if they don't look nice that way. Tuf-Kat 23:31, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I'd personally like every instrument to have its own article, but I also know how difficult it is to write decent articles on fairly obscure non-western instruments. If border pipe has its own article, for example, then I can't see any reason why other varieties shouldn't.--Cherry blossom tree 11:28, 28 March 2006 (UTC)