Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Music

It seems to have become standard on Wikipedia to trade semantic and historical accuracy of song and album titles for hard-line notions of "grammatical correctness". I just want it to be know that this is biasing Wikipedia against meaning conveyed through stylizations and that it makes it less accurate and less useful for scholarship and historical study. It is also completely inconsistent with how consumers might see and find works. For example, many poems and songs use all lowercase with some uppercase letters to spell out words. By removing stylizations, you are deliberately erasing conveyed meaning from the title. This goes for every single artistic work, including poetry and music. A few others on Wikipedia, like @Livelikemusic seem to call the use of stylizations "fan-driven"; this reasoning is biased and to me would go against Wikipedia's neutrality. If you want to be for or against stylizations, you have to have logical reasons for doing so. Anything else would not be neutral at all. In my opinion, there are no logical reasons for going against stylizations, but there are plenty of logical reasons to take them into account, some of which I've already discussed above. Krixano (talk) 04:46, 20 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

This is a formal notice that I will be bowing out of this discussion, because I take internet cults very seriously, and after spending several hours reading a lot of user interaction here on Wikipedia, I have decided in my best judgement that this is an unsafe environment that I would consider to be an internet cult. I apologize to anyone expecting me to continue the discussion, but I cannot do that. You can view my User page, if it remains up, for additional reasons to this decision. Krixano (talk) 12:08, 20 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Assuming this is the right place to mention this. I'm sort of curious since I've seen it on some articles but not on others; why do Personnel lists on some albums use ''' to separate personnel instead of ====? I went to check this page to see if it was a MOS thing, but it appears to not be, so I'm stumped. Neo Purgatorio (talk) 18:12, 18 May 2024 (UTC)Reply

If it's about presentation, it's a MOS thing. Very basically pseudo headings are used when editors decide they should be (we have discretion about almost everything). They don't appear in the Table of Contents and offer no natural target for browsers, but give readers a heading-like indicator. If there has ever been a discussion about this specific concern, it may have resulted in a forgotten decision or none. If there's nothing written in stone about what should be done with personnelle, but there's a clear common style in current use, defer to that (it's natural consensus), and if it's mostly one way, with a relatively few outliers, it could be worth drafting guidelines based on the common style. Fred Gandt · talk · contribs 20:30, 18 May 2024 (UTC)Reply

Seconding everything Fred said. Worth clarifying the usefulness of pseudoheaders in keeping from flooding the TOC. As an example, I recently created Everyone's Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, where all the personnel are separately listed track-by-track. If I had used === instead, there would be 16 additional headers and the TOC would be longer than the infobox. In cases like this, I find preservation of space to be preferable. There is also the option of {{TOC limit}}, but I wouldn't use it in that article because it could interfere with other level 3 headings that I/other editors may want to apply later as they become relevant. As for a guideline, I think MOS:PSEUDOHEAD does a good job of getting this across already. QuietHere (talk | contributions) 04:57, 19 May 2024 (UTC)Reply

Maybe I'm easily confused or going blind, but aren't there a lot of words capitalized that should be lowercase, in the section "Classical music titles", even in the examples? TooManyFingers (talk) 05:14, 7 August 2024 (UTC)Reply

If you're referring to the generic examples (Piano Concerto No. 5, Sixth Symphony, Requiem), those are titles of works, so I don't see why they wouldn't be capitalized. It'd be the same as an album called Album or The Album. And if that's not what you meant, then please clarify, because I don't see anything else I would consider amiss in that section. QuietHere (talk | contributions) 14:01, 7 August 2024 (UTC)Reply

I was confused because I didn't read some of the material correctly. It was all fine already. TooManyFingers (talk) 08:25, 8 August 2024 (UTC)Reply

The current rule mandates e.g. "it was the Beatles' first album" rather than "it was The Beatles' first album". This goes against the common writing style I've read in newspapers, books, etc. for many years. (I pay attention to these things, have studied some linguistics, and read Fowler's grammar etc.) How was this wiki rule chosen? 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:A5E9:B57F:509D:732E (talk) 13:32, 30 August 2024 (UTC)Reply

It was decided following an epic debate in 2012. It was even covered by the Wall Street Journal. If anyone is interested in my own nerdy thoughts on the subject, here they are. Popcornfud (talk) 13:48, 30 August 2024 (UTC)Reply

Agree, see lowercase more often than not in books, although new Steven Hyden Springsteen book uses "The" style. Caro7200 (talk) 13:56, 30 August 2024 (UTC)Reply

Indeed, the IP above is wrong that the upper-case style is more common. In my library of Beatles books, I'd say the mid-sentence lower-case style is more common by a ten-to-one ratio, at least. Tkbrett (✉) 14:22, 30 August 2024 (UTC)Reply