Wikipedia:Peer review/Music of the United States/archive2

Music of the United States

Previous PR here. This was recently the US CotW, which saw some significant improvement. I've been working on it a long time and would like to bring it to FAC. Tuf-Kat 06:58, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Looks great. However, one of the FAC requirements is to adhere to Wikipedia:Summary style which states that the starting point that an article may be considered to be too long is 30KB of prose and that by 50KB of prose being 'too long' is an almost certainty. By my estimation this article has nearly 60KB of prose. This topic does not, IMO, warrant the extra reading time that is reserved for huge topics like WWII and should therefore be condensed to improve readability. All the detail is already in the daughter articles. This article should only present a summary that can be easily read in one sitting and link to daughter articles that expand on the various sub-topics (and so on with the daughter articles). That gives reader a choice about the amount of detail they are exposed to ; many will need a more compact treatment while some will require more detail. We should serve all groups. --mav 22:02, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

50k is NOT too long for a Featured Article (we have many that are larger than that). This article is written in a summary style — it could serve as an exemplary article for demonstrating what summary style is, in my opinion — but the subject is so broad and complicated that even a summary ends up being a little longer than average FA length. And that's just fine. Andrew Levine 15:02, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Summary style is an FA requirement and that page clearly states that anything above 50KB of prose is almost certainly too long. Exceptions are sometimes made for very expansive and important topics. While this topic may be expansive, it is not as important as something such as an article on a world war and thus should not be so long. I'm also only counting prose size ; referencing often makes FAs shot above 80KB when they really only have 40KB of prose. Those type of articles pass FAC all the time. Less is often more when it comes to text - a more on topic and shorter article will have more people read it all the way through than a booklet-sized article. Good writing can pack lots of the most important details in a concise package. Summary style gives readers a choice as to the amount of detail they are exposed to. All reader types win. --mav 23:43, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

I notice from the history of the Summary style page that it was you who wrote the "30kb" limit into it in the first place several years ago. Having the advantage of coming to Wikipedia early doesn't make one person's opinion an official policy. Anyway, I wouldn't take for granted that a war that lasted six years is that much more important a subject than a history detailing a span of more than 200 years of artistic development. Certainly every section of the present article is a summary of a larger page. Every section is stripped down to a very basic, bare-bones description, just as Summary Style requires. What exactly is it that you want removed? Do you have concrete suggestions for improving the article? Andrew Levine 01:12, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I know that it is longer than is really ideal, but bigger articles have been featured. I'm going through it now to see how much I can trim, but I don't think very much can be removed. It already covers all of American country music in three paragraphs, for example. The largest single section is "rock, metal and punk", with five paragraphs covering everything from the birth of rock through grunge.

I've managed to trim a couple kb off (I'm not all the way done. Removing all the external links, pics, sounds, and templates, there's about 56k of text (note that include the words that make up all the footnotes, which I have no way of easily removing). Tuf-Kat

Quick comments:

• the "main article" for "Hip hop music"is not properly linked.
• Why are the "further" reading numbered???

Circeus 02:45, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Fixed both. Tuf-Kat

The most I can say right now is that the footnotes should not be coming between the sentences and the punctuation marks, rather they should follow the punctuation. I have already started to make the change. Other than that, it is of the same quality that I have come to expect from the music articles you have shepherded to Featured status. Andrew Levine 04:16, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Though I'm not sure I understand this one sentence: "Notable early '80s subgenres where the overarching term "heavy metal" is occasionally still in use include the faster thrash metal style, pioneered by Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica and Slayer." Should this be "was still in use"? And why does the sentence begin "subgenres" and then give only one? Andrew Levine 04:24, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Also, the "folk music" and "blues and gospel" section have some footnotes (I count five total) using the old {{ref}} templates that were never converted to Cite.php. Andrew Levine 04:36, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments and kind words. Personally, I prefer the footnote before the period (just seems more tidy to me), but I'm not really bothered by switching them. I've re-worded the thrash metal sentence. I'll have to search the history to find those unconverted footnotes again, but not tonight. Tuf-Kat 03:50, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I fixed all the footnotes. Tuf-Kat 00:02, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Ugh, switching those footnotes to cite.php added one k to the overall size... I then did a lot of tweaking, and removed as much as I could without losing important information... and the total size went back down to where it was. Tuf-Kat 00:26, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

• Comment: I believe the only red link in this article is for Parchman, Mississippi. Any takers? It gets 12000 google hits. Tuf-Kat 04:07, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

It seems to be mostly the location of Mississippi State Penitentiary. Circeus 00:11, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

I've switched the link to the prison, which I'm certain was where that recording came from. Tuf-Kat 00:43, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

I tend to think of article length in terms of paragraphs (I think each paragraph averages out to about 1k), because I sometimes use the sentence paragraph technique, especially with expansive topics like this one.

• Lead: 3
• Characteristics: 3
• Folk music: 3
  • Blues and spirituals: 2
  • Other immigrants: 2
• Classical music: 1
  • Early classical music: 4 (to the end of the 19th century)
  • 20th century: 2
• Popular music: 1
  • Early popular song: 4 (secular colonial songs, Civil War, minstrel shows and blackface, Broadway)
  • Blues and gospel: 3 (also ragtime)
  • Jazz: 3
  • Country music: 3
  • R&B and soul: 3 (also funk)
  • Rock, metal and punk: 5
  • Hip hop: 2
  • Other niche styles: 2 (1 para on generic stuff, mentioning Hawaiian, klezmer, etc, 1 para on Latin pop)
• Industry: 3
• Education: 2
• Holidays and festivals: 2

For a grand total of 53 paragraphs, which I don't think is unreasonable for this topic. I considered cutting the institutions section entirely, but decided not to -- it would only drop 2k anyway. Tuf-Kat 00:43, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

• I think the text itself is down to about 47-48k (one of the drawbacks to the cite.php system is that it isn't easy to remove footnotes) Tuf-Kat
  • And now, on third thought I removed the music institutions section, which puts it at 45-46k. Tuf-Kat