This is the
talk page for discussing
WikiProject Albums and anything related to its purposes and tasks. |
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Albums Project‑class | |||||||
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WikiProject Albums was featured in a WikiProject Report in the Signpost on 11 July 2011. |
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This page has archives. Sections older than 30 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 3 sections are present. |
There is a requested move discussion at Talk:See You Up There#Requested move 25 February 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. – robertsky ( talk) 14:15, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
Hello everyone, it's been a while... various family issues meant I had to put all non-essential stuff on hold for most of 2023, including Wikipedia. Anyway, I've been thinking over a couple of things while I've been away, and one of them is the critical reception section in album articles. Many articles start this section with the sentence "The album received critical acclaim." But how useful is this statement? The truth of the matter is that the days when an album would get an absolute pasting (in the UK at least) in NME or Melody Maker are long gone, and it's tough nowadays to find a review for any album in any genre that is less than 6/10. The nature of journalism these days means that nobody wants to be over-critical of any record, resulting in bland reviews and high scores.
I had a look at the aggregate scores in Metacritic since 2020. From 2020 to 2023, there were a total of 1533 albums included. The number of albums that scored lower than the score needed for "general acclaim" is only 25, and only two scored lower than 50%. Most of us would consider an average rating of 70% or 7/10 to be a pretty solid rating, and 1413 albums achieved this, i.e. more than 92% of all the albums included on Metacritic so far this decade. So saying that an album received "critical acclaim" seems a pretty meaningless statement to me, as virtually all of them are acclaimed.
I can understand including the comment as part of the Metacritic rating, e.g. "The album has a rating of 67% on Metacritic, indicating 'general acclaim' on the website", because this is at least a verifiable statement. But is there any point in starting the section with such an OR statement, when it has almost no worth? And should we remove this opening statement from any album articles that include it? If an album is notable enough to have a Wikipedia article, it was probably notable enough to receive good album reviews. In fact, it would be far more notable to mention the poor ratings of the 25 albums that dipped below the 60% score, as they are far rarer, or the ones that score 80%+ and receive "universal acclaim" on Metacritic. Richard3120 ( talk) 01:06, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Describing a film with superlatives such as "critically acclaimed" or "box-office bomb" is loaded language and an exceptional claim that must be attributed to multiple high-quality sources. Be wary of news headlines, which are not reliable sources, that may contain exaggerated or sensationalized claims not supported by the body of the source.(There's more at the link.) Popcornfud ( talk) 12:49, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Heads up that I've been meaning to make this for a while and finally did today: d:Wikidata:WikiProject Albums. Anyone who is interested in structured data about albums, please do join and help bring best practices and complete data to our sister project. ― Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 22:13, 14 April 2024 (UTC)
There is a discussion on the talk page about "Release history" table with four options rather than "[Record] Labels": "Distributor", "Licensee", "Marketer", "Promoter". Any contributions would be helpful. 183.171.123.25 ( talk) 12:08, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing
WikiProject Albums and anything related to its purposes and tasks. |
|
Albums Project‑class | |||||||
|
WikiProject Albums was featured in a WikiProject Report in the Signpost on 11 July 2011. |
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10 |
This page has archives. Sections older than 30 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 3 sections are present. |
There is a requested move discussion at Talk:See You Up There#Requested move 25 February 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. – robertsky ( talk) 14:15, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
Hello everyone, it's been a while... various family issues meant I had to put all non-essential stuff on hold for most of 2023, including Wikipedia. Anyway, I've been thinking over a couple of things while I've been away, and one of them is the critical reception section in album articles. Many articles start this section with the sentence "The album received critical acclaim." But how useful is this statement? The truth of the matter is that the days when an album would get an absolute pasting (in the UK at least) in NME or Melody Maker are long gone, and it's tough nowadays to find a review for any album in any genre that is less than 6/10. The nature of journalism these days means that nobody wants to be over-critical of any record, resulting in bland reviews and high scores.
I had a look at the aggregate scores in Metacritic since 2020. From 2020 to 2023, there were a total of 1533 albums included. The number of albums that scored lower than the score needed for "general acclaim" is only 25, and only two scored lower than 50%. Most of us would consider an average rating of 70% or 7/10 to be a pretty solid rating, and 1413 albums achieved this, i.e. more than 92% of all the albums included on Metacritic so far this decade. So saying that an album received "critical acclaim" seems a pretty meaningless statement to me, as virtually all of them are acclaimed.
I can understand including the comment as part of the Metacritic rating, e.g. "The album has a rating of 67% on Metacritic, indicating 'general acclaim' on the website", because this is at least a verifiable statement. But is there any point in starting the section with such an OR statement, when it has almost no worth? And should we remove this opening statement from any album articles that include it? If an album is notable enough to have a Wikipedia article, it was probably notable enough to receive good album reviews. In fact, it would be far more notable to mention the poor ratings of the 25 albums that dipped below the 60% score, as they are far rarer, or the ones that score 80%+ and receive "universal acclaim" on Metacritic. Richard3120 ( talk) 01:06, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Describing a film with superlatives such as "critically acclaimed" or "box-office bomb" is loaded language and an exceptional claim that must be attributed to multiple high-quality sources. Be wary of news headlines, which are not reliable sources, that may contain exaggerated or sensationalized claims not supported by the body of the source.(There's more at the link.) Popcornfud ( talk) 12:49, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Heads up that I've been meaning to make this for a while and finally did today: d:Wikidata:WikiProject Albums. Anyone who is interested in structured data about albums, please do join and help bring best practices and complete data to our sister project. ― Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 22:13, 14 April 2024 (UTC)
There is a discussion on the talk page about "Release history" table with four options rather than "[Record] Labels": "Distributor", "Licensee", "Marketer", "Promoter". Any contributions would be helpful. 183.171.123.25 ( talk) 12:08, 18 April 2024 (UTC)