I'm posting this to wikipedia-l as it concerns all Wikipedias; albums are
in that respect language independent.
As you may know,
freedb.org provides a huge open content database of
existing music CDs. Overall, the statistics page currently lists 882172
individual CDs. For each album it provides the name, band, track
information (including length) and sometimes other details such as the
genre.
In part because FreeDB already exists, I believe we need a strict policy
against mere CD database entries for Wikipedia that provide no additional
information about an album. If there are no objections, I will create the
respective policy page on the English Wikipedia.
My reasoning:
1) If we imported all entries from FreeDB into Wikipedia, some facilities
of Wikipedia would become unusable. "Random page" would lose much of its
current value. The search would be massively slowed (because the database
size would drastically increase) and return many useless hits, because
song titles use pretty much every word in every language. Possible future
facilities such as an "Ancient pages" feature to view the pages that have
been edited the longest time ago would also be drastically impaired.
2) Much of the imported information would be neglected -- FreeDB database
entries are generated automatically by running an application on a
computer while a CD is inserted, which is why there are so many of them.
We cannot and should not keep up with this process. We would only
duplicate existing work.
3) Wikipedia is not a mirror for source material. As far as only album
data is entered, in my opinion the criterion of "source material" is
satisfied.
4) Not allowing the import of FreeDB entries but allowing manual entry of
album track lists is even worse. We create an extremely incomplete list,
and encourage our users to duplicate existing work.
What we should do instead, I think, is this:
1) Make a clear policy that pages which only contain track lists and
nothing else of value can be deleted (they still need to be put on the
"Votes for deletion" page or equivalent on other Wikipedias, but they can
be deleted quickly).
2) Make another policy that pages about bands should *not* contain links
to the individual albums. These links should be created on demand, not for
all album titles. Instead, add an external link to the FreeDB query for
that band to the band page.
3) Supply criteria for what kind of pages about albums are acceptable --
provide good examples. For instance, a detailed discussion of the music on
a particular album, with excerpted lyrics, notes etc. is certainly
acceptable. In such a discussion, a track listing could also be added to
the article.
Please note: This is not at all intended as an offense against the Albums
WikiProject. Good, comprehensive articles about albums should most
definitely be added. What I believe we should avoid is to turn Wikipedia
into Everything2 and to import everything that could possibly at some
point be turned into an article. This is also not a general policy against
bot import of articles, only in this case, where there is already a
collaborative open content project that fulfills the need perfectly and no
point for us to duplicate its work.
Even if this policy is not implemented, I will point out at this juncture
that I am strongly opposed to an import of the FreeDB data, should that
ever come up. But to be consistent and to avoid unnecessary work, I think
we should apply these rules even to existing, manually added album pages.
Regards,
Erik