Wikipedia talk:Featured sound candidates/Archive 8

Criteria – role & bird recordings
I'm not sure that discussing at great length individual works which have or have not got through the FS process is very helpful at this stage. Without trawling through the archive I have a memory that the Yemen national anthem as recorded by the Military Band was not representative of the work and therefore could not be considered a fair reproduction. I remember going onto YouTube to find a proper recording of it and there were fairly major problems with the nominated recording. Could many of the issues raised above only be dealt with in the nomination process? They are exceptions which we will deal with as and when they come up, and not at this stage in restarting FS. I think the "role" part of the criteria needs to be more explicit; the brief sentence we have there is not really enough. If it's so important, why is it 3rd in the list? It should have fairly boiler-plate description of it being "representative of Wikipedia's best work", and the "best illustration of the topic discussed on the page". In all honesty, if FS is to be restarted, the above discussions do nothing to encourage the community to engage. On a different subject entirely I came across this page of bird recordings, which have been posted as CC-by-sa so are available to WP. The main page is here and I did a search by license which gives this page. Ben (Major Bloodnok) (talk) 09:23, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
 * The bird recordings certainly deserve examination. How many are already uploaded to Commons? At least bird recordings are conceptually simpler than music recordings in terms of the criteria. BTW, if there were any thought of restarting this forum, could we have suggestions as to how the laughably easy benchmark for passing—a minimum of one for and one against—can be fixed? Tony   (talk)  12:17, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
 * It's two for and one against; the nominator is a person. However, that said, I would very much hope that we have more participation than that. If we accept that level of support, it would be short term, just long enough to get some participation again. Adam Cuerden (talk) 12:52, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
 * First, no, it's one reviewer for, and one reviewer against: this passes. The nominator obviously isn't considered a reviewer, and has a strong conflict of interest in voting. I've never understood why the nominator was included in the equation in the first place. The system can't possibly be considered as a serious process as it is currently set up. Second, two reviewers seems rather too few to be waving nominations through. And the time-period is far too short, given the small participation rate we had before. Tony   (talk)  13:31, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Take up the nominator issue with Featured Pictures. If you win there, we'll change it for Featured sounds, but FP is the project most similar to ours, so we really should use it as a rough template, even if we may need to go back a ways to look at how it started up. (That said, the initial FP seems to have been a criteria-free majority vote; I think we can do a bit better than that.) As for the number: We'll use the maximum number of reviewers we can reasonably get. I'd say that three supports would be a good initial bar, including the nominator, but pragmatically, we won't get more people if it's impossible for anything to pass, so we have to be reasonable. Adam Cuerden (talk) 14:09, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
 * On the birdsong, they have been added to the Commons (here) by AndyMabbet and the Birds Project. It was all done fairly recently, so they have not got very far in adding the sounds to the relevant pages (to be fair, there are around 400 recordings). On the matter of the number of nominations, I hope we can get more than 3 responses. For the moment and prior to any change by FP or by FS to eliminate the potential COI (I can see what Tony1 means but I think it's a little extreme to see it as a COI), how about a minimum number of votes (say 5) with a simple majority having it their way. This would get rid of the problem of the nominator being the deciding vote. If you'd prefer we could go for a supermajority, but the project is not big enough for this yet and we would not have the numbers. Ben (Major Bloodnok) (talk) 15:22, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I have pulled up 6 species and none of their bird calls are licensed correctly for WP.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 16:47, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
 * TTT - true, and these would not be useable by WP. The good folk at the Birds Project are currently in the process of using what recordings have been released with the correct license (you have to do a search by license). See the Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Birds/Archive_63#Bird_sounds page for further discussion. Ben (Major Bloodnok) (talk) 17:18, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
 * This looks a lot like the anthems did when I got involved with that. All the most popular birds that have good recordings from the freely licensed ones have been done. If we get back up and running, I will have a look at the scraps.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 00:12, 22 February 2013 (UTC)


 * "the nominator is a person"—sorry, the nominator can be person if s/he likes, but they can't escape the fundamental conflict of interest involved in being counted in a vote. Who ever heard of a nominator opposing their nomination? Why are nominators voting at all? It's entirely redundant and inappropriate. Nominators are welcome to review other nominations, not their own. Tony   (talk)  06:46, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
 * If you want to have this new higher standard project, either you need to 1) discount the nominator, 2) make the threshold higher than the old count of three or 3) require a supermajority. Keep in mind you will have people like me who are untrained ears involved. You could have a nominator and two people like me mussing up your higher standards. Again, I reiterate my support for a two level set of criteria where a GS level would accept 3 counting nominator and a FS level would require more.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 08:26, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
 * (edit conflict)Tony1 - this is obviously an issue you are passionate about. Just to be clear, your problem is not simply about the numbers of votes in question? So, if there were 5 votes for and one against including the nominator you would still have an objection. This does become more of an issue if the number of votes is so small the nominator becomes significant, and is the deciding vote for instance. In this case I agree with you. This is probably not safe way to gauge a FS. I don't quite understand your objection in the wider sense. I can't see why a nominator is separate from a voter, especially if they have discovered a sound on WP which they think is FS standard. I can see a protential problem if the nominator has been involved in the artistic creation of the sound (by performing music), but less so if they were simply recording an existing phenomenon (eg birdsong) where there is little artistic input. Does your identification of COI as an issue still hold in these cases, or is it not a problem here? What I am trying to get at is whether raising the minimum number of votes required, to say 5, would go some way to resolve your objections. Where there is an overwhelming majority one way or the other, a nominator's vote is moot. I'm honestly not sure about this one, although I can see that the nominator's vote can be taken as read, and so the rest of the community should decide either way. Ben (Major Bloodnok) (talk) 08:35, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I have to agree with Tony on this. Nominators shouldn't !vote on their own nominations. The nominations should stay as neutral as possible. --Vejvančický (talk / contribs) 12:17, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Having reflected on the above I am willing to accept the principle that the nomination of the recording should not be classed as a vote as ultimately it's not in the interest of FS to have decisions made by a tiny minority. I don't see how a nominator can be "neutral" but thanks for the comment Vejvančický.Ben (Major Bloodnok) (talk) 15:07, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Of course, nominators cannot be 'neutral', however, their nominations should be assessed only by uninvolved editors. --Vejvančický (talk / contribs) 15:22, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

I quite simply can't see any reason to make a lesser-known process handle nominators very, very differently than WP:FPC and commons:COM:FPC, and I suspect it could lead to biting the newbies if we did restrict nominators from voting, as you know someone's going to end up yelling at someone for supporting their nomination. Adam Cuerden (talk) 14:39, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I honestly don't understand the COI issue in this case, and my questions have gone unanswered. While I have made my opinion clear above, perhaps a minimum number of votes in favour is necessary (i.e. 3), in cases where the total number of votes does not reach 5, but is otherwise in favour. This would still remove the issue of COI, and we won't have occasions where a FS is passed with a majority of 1, which is certainly not great for the project. Ben (Major Bloodnok) (talk) 07:59, 9 March 2013 (UTC)


 * The seven-day time limit kills it. And the one-against, one-support pass benchmark is weird. Tony   (talk)  08:50, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
 * OK thanks Tony, so we extend the deadline to a month, 2 months? A minimum number of votes is needed - is that a minimum total votes or votes on one side or the other? I'm not sure it really matters as long as we have all agreed that a vote 2-1 is not enough for a pass. Does this answer your COI concerns? Ben (Major Bloodnok) (talk) 08:31, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Sound Lab
Is there a place to take sound files to get them fixed up, analogous to WP:Graphics Lab? Incidentally, being instructed to comment here at the talk page of an inactive page is a little odd.Anythingyouwant (talk) 23:01, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Portal:Featured sound candidates listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Portal:Featured sound candidates. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Legacypac (talk) 01:15, 12 April 2019 (UTC)