Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Music theory/Archive 8

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This article is frankly terrible. Inconsistent and unexplained chord descriptions; essay-like WP:OR comments; inadequate citations.Can I suggest a working-party to improve it? Smerus (talk) 13:48, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi all, there's been a flurry of activity at Tempo lately, possibly related to a discussion of bpm values for different tempo terms on an off-wiki noticeboard. Looking at the list of basic terminology, there is no indication whatsoever there as to the source of the bpm values. They don't match the Dolmetch reference (which is no surprise because it's used only to support the idea that baroque speeds were faster) and the other reference applicable to the entire section is a book that, from the note, is obviously expressing a particular viewpoint. The whole article has been marked as needing citation since 2012. I'm worried that these bpm values may just be numbers that have been edited up and down by passing individuals with a viewpoint over the years, and may not really reflect any source whatsoever, even if they once did.

There are two options that strike me as reasonable: we could either give ranges derived from a range of reliable sources (I don't think this is synthesis, it's no different to stating that someone's year of birth was between 1348 and 1351 according to different sources) - or we could pick one source and give its values (but is that a copyright infringement?). Which is the better option? Does anyone have any suggestions about good sources? To my mind, ideally we should be looking at sources who aim to give a general view of how people interpret those speeds, not at publications by individual musicologists making the point that we might be misinterpreting composers from one era or another (as they're likely to be giving values that performers aren't using).

We could just get rid of the numbers on the grounds they're unsourced. I could have BOLDly done it, but I don't think it'd be helpful to the reader, so I haven't. The values are useful, but they really should be sourced. Elemimele (talk) 10:49, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Quality assessments by Wikipedia editors rate articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class= parameter to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.

No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.

However, if your project has decided to "opt out" and follow a non-standard quality assessment approach, all you have to do is modify your wikiproject banner template to pass {{WPBannerMeta}} a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom parameter. If this is done, changes to the general quality assessment will be ignored, and your project-level assessment will be displayed and used to create categories, as at present. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:57, 12 April 2023 (UTC)