Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/The KLF discography/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured list nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was not promoted 21:44, 20 January 2008.

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The KLF discography

This discography was previously unsuccessfully nominated; the discussion eventually reached stalemate mostly due to the use of non-free images. For the record, the article looked something like this when it was last here. Since then it was moved to KLF Communications. I've now refactored the list in line with current Featured Lists such as 50 Cent discography and Nine Inch Nails discography and restored it to The KLF discography. (I have to be honest here and say I preferred it before :), but I accept that for now the community doesn't want discographies to be illustrated).

The objections last time were:

• That it used non-free images. These have all been removed.
• That it looked bad without images (this revision shows some of how it looked, albums are missing because I deleted the template). I've refactored and reformatted in line with current best practice (I hope).
• Formatting of references. I'm now using the standard {{cite ...}} templates.
• Too much peripheral info. The KLF Communications section has been moved into The KLF for now, and Additional communicators has been split out to List of The KLF's creative associates. All that remains is a discography.

In short, I believe the article now meets the criteria and would welcome your feedback.

A couple more notes: 1) the talk page is very quiet; a few issues and questions I posted there remain unanswered; if you see something questionable it may already be covered there. 2) The KLF have 2 BPI silver awards for sales of singles and 1 platinum album. They also have 1 gold single and 1 gold album from the RIAA. I haven't slotted this info into the article at all yet because of formatting concerns - see Talk:The_KLF_discography#Certifications. Advice welcome. --kingboyk (talk) 20:30, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Comments This looks like it was alot of work to whip into shape, so kudos there. I do have a few questions or comments on the list though. My main concern is with the formatting of the tables. Most of the tables are so full of information (which is a good thing) that the tables themselves are really big and unwieldy (which is a bad thing). For people like myself with a relatively small monitor, it's a mess, to be honest. Basically there are too many columns, and some of them get squished into being really narrow and tall. Also, partly because of the circumstances of the discography (such as the same band having multiple names), alot of the formatting stuff contradicts some formats in most other discographies. So, my point is, I think a couple of format changes would fix both problems, while still keeping all that information where it should be. So, here's my suggestions as far as that goes:

• I think in all of the discogs that give catalog nmbers, they're just been put in parenthesis after the label name instead of given their own line (as in the albums table) or column (as in the singles table).
• The Artist columns are a bit of a mess too. Putting this information into its own column seems unneccessary, since its all the same people (except Disco 2000), and most of links provided are redirects anyways. I would recommend putting that into the same column as the album information, perhaps as "by Disco 2000" or something like that.

So, with those two combined, the the album information cells would like something like:

The "What Time Is Love?" Story

by The KLF/Various Artists

• Released: 25 September 1989
• Label: KLF Communications (JAMS LP 4)

And something like:

"All You Need Is Love"

by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu

• Released: 9 March 1987
• Label: KLF Communications ([The Sound Of Mu(sic)] JAMS 23)

Anyways, I do have more comments, but I'll save those until this stuff gets sorted out/discused. Drewcifer (talk) 12:39, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Decent ideas. Not entirely sure about the artist column being removed, but it looks ok in your example.

I suppose another possibility is putting the chart data into seperate tables.

Anyone else have any thoughts on this? And what were the other issues you have please? Thanks. --kingboyk (talk) 21:29, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Just keep in mind that my above suggestions (as well as a few to come) are aimed at making the tables less wide, since they display really poorly on smaller monitors. For instance, in the singles table, the album column is only wide enough for one word per line. But I don't think that taking the chart info out is a good idea either. That would be a last resort, since there's plenty of things you can do to just streamline things a bit. One thing I noticed is that the chart columns could be cleaned up considerably. First, it appears like the column widths are bigger than they need to be (all of them have a width factor of 40). If you took out that code for each column it would help a little bit. Also, the text within the top of the columns with the country abbreviations could be formatted better if the accompanying reference were on a separate line (ie with a <br /> in between). Also, alot of the abbreviations should be changed to be consistent with other discographies, as well as to be less text. For example CH has always been abbreviated as SW, and "U.S. Dance Club Play" (which looks really bad on my monitor) should be "US D/CP". Take a look at other FL discogs for more examples of ways to format and abbreviate. Also, "Chart positions" should be changed to "Chart peak positions" to be more precise and consistent with other FL discogs. Also, the dashes used for something that didn't chart should be the em-dash (–), not the long dash (—). Drewcifer (talk) 21:56, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks.

All of the formatting was copied (literally) from existing Featured Lists, including the width; I'm not sure why the dash is incorrect then, but that can be fixed as can and will removing the fixed width.

"Chart positions" is the term used in the FL 50 Cent discography. Remember, I don't even like this layout so it's based entirely on the existing Featured Lists! I can change that though. Is "Chart peak positions" right or should it actually be "Peak chart positions"?

The country codes were taken verbatim from the source, but I don't mind changing Switzerland, and thanks for the advice re the US Dance chart. --kingboyk (talk) 00:03, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

OK, the dashes look the same to me in 50 Cent and NIN as KLF; and it seems to me a stylistic choice. I'll change this if there's a MOS guideline about it somewhere, but otherwise not. I'm not jumping through hoops for the sake of it.

According to "Switzerland", CH is the country's ISO code. It's also it's internet domain name. On what basis are you saying it should be SW? --kingboyk (talk) 00:09, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Fixed cell widths removed. --kingboyk (talk) 00:16, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

My mistake on the dashes thing. I could've sworn they were all em-dashes, but it appears I was mistaken. Forget I ever mentioned it. As for the country abbreviations, there's three reasons I suggest changing it to SW: first, for consistency sake (can you tell I'm a sucker for consistency? =) ), two, even though Switzerland's country code is CH, and Spain's is ES, etc, those are abbreviations are based on languages other than english (Confoederatio Helvetica and España respectively). Since this is an english encyclopedia, we should stick to one language. And three, even though most European people might recognize CH as representing Switzerland just out of general knowledge and cultural proximity, most non-Europeans would not, so we should try and abbreviate logically. However, I did make another mistake: discographies have tended to abbreviate Switzerland as SWI. Three letter abbreviations have mostly been used in the past, to be even more clear, with a few obvious exceptions like New Zealand (NZ), US, and UK. The best examples to look at would be Nine Inch Nails discography and Nirvana discography. As for the charts thing, saying "peak" is just more exact. Saying "chart positions" would imply your going to discuss all of its positions, or that the ones presented aren't neccessarily as high as the release got. However you want to word it is fine, but going by NIN it should be Chart peak positions. And yea, 50 Cent and Nirvana and probably a bunch more just say Chart positions, but I think I'll go around and change that myself right now. But really, all of this is pretty minor stuff: my main problem with the article so far is still with the artists column and catalog numbers, for all the reasons mentioned above. Drewcifer (talk) 04:04, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Oppose, reluctantly. Due to the above-mentioned issues and the lack of movement/edits concerning them within 10 days, as well as a bunch of other suggestions/criticisms I never even got to. Honestly, the article's organization is kind of a mess, and although that's not really the article's/nominator's fault (it seems the KLF did so much random stuff that making an ordered list of it all is a sizable task), I believe alot could be done to make it more comprehensible. Drewcifer (talk) 01:31, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

• Comments This is well-cited and comprehensive. At the very least, it needs two WP:MUSTARD fixes:
  • The number "1" chart position should be unbolded because it goes against WP:NPOV.
  • Remove the piped links to music years. For example, it should be "1987" and not "[[1987 in music|1987]]".
  • And this is a non-WP:MUSTARD issue, but I think the fixed width in the singles should be reinserted. It doesn't change the overall width of the table. Maybe it's just my personal aesthetics and I don't want to be an instruction creep, but I find it looks terribly inconsistent to have varying widths. It's probably not worth opposing because of that though.

Spellcast (talk) 08:43, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.