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Put an alive image !!!!!! I'm not sure but I think this is official Alive cover; http://www.chartstats.com/images/artwork/22926.jpg — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.32.248.81 (talk) 18:00, 27 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]


YES!! IT'S OFFICIAL!! WELL DONE! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.107.108.38 (talk) 14:39, 10 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 23 April 2017

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The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: No Consensus. (non-admin closure) There is no clear policy on which to hang such a move, thus it comes down to personal opinion, and a consensus has not developed among the participating editors. The RfC on the Beatles was about in-text usage, not disambiguation, and the discussion that resulted in the disambiguation style of Beatles albums was informal, had limited participation, and was never intended to apply to all albums of all artists that start with an uppercase "The". As a side note, I suggest an RfC to determine if there is wide community consensus for a policy to remove "The" from parenthetical disambiguators (rather than bringing up further requested moves on the topic). — InsertCleverPhraseHere 08:16, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]


– Per Wikipedia:Requests for mediation/The Beatles and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject The Beatles/Archive 8#Parenthetical disambiguators, the definite article should be omitted. Articles in Category:The Beatles albums and Category:The Beatles songs use (Beatles album) and (Beatles song) for disambiguation, not (The Beatles album) or (The Beatles song). Don't Let Me Down (Beatles song) is not at Don't Let Me Down (The Beatles song). However, the Black Eyed Peas is not as clear cut, because the group was originally named "Black Eyed Peas" and officially changed to "the Black Eyed Peas" subsequently. I still think this is worth discussing. feminist 10:26, 23 April 2017 (UTC) --Relisting. Anarchyte (work | talk) 11:22, 30 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Extended discussion

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A more detailed rationale for this and any similar cases, because this "rehash this forever on more and more pages until victory through exhaustion is achieved" stragedy really needs to stop:

  • WP:CONSISTENT: The decision has already been rendered by consensus, against a leading "The" in such constructions, at a sitewide dispute-resolution forum, and this was reaffirmed when the "issue" was dredged up again at a wikiproject, the one most likely to support always including "The". If it didn't happen with the Beatles (or The Beatles, however you prefer), then we do not need any other test case. This consensus has been stable for almost 5 years, which is forever in WP time, and it is widely cited at RM and related discussions as precedent (which means the big stack of RMs that have removed a pointless The are also precedential, in WP's "consensus has not changed" sense). The existence of a few straggler articles like Aftermath (The Rolling Stones album) that slipped under the radar doesn't overturn that consensus, much less overturn multiple article naming policies; it just means we have more cleanup to do to be consistent with Beatles disambiguations, and those involving innumerable other bands that "officially" have a "The" at the beginning of their name which is dropped routinely when context warrants doing so.
  • WP:NATURAL: It's natural English to drop a leading "The" from a band name (or any other organization or entity) in any construction that doesn't grammatically require it, especially one where it's awkward, and most especially of all when the name is used as an adjectival modifier, as is the case here. (Non-band example: "The Queen's Guard patrols royal residences in the UK", but "He's been a Queen's Guard captain since 1989" – no "the".) Back to the band: no one would write "The third The Black Eyed Peas album was released in ..." (WP certainly would not use such messy phrasing); it's "The third Black Eyed Peas album ...". Likewise "Two Black Eyed Peas members were ...", not "Two The Black Eyed Peas members were ...". The in such adjectival constructions is not idiomatic (i.e. fluent or "standard") English. As a song/album disambiguator, the concise "(Black Eyed Peas foo)" is also WP:RECOGNIZABLE and WP:PRECISE in that context; no one will think it's about beans who can magically sing and play guitar. There is no WP article titles criterion it does not satisfy, as an adjectival disambiguator.
  • WP:COMMONNAME, WP:OFFICIALNAME, WP:SOAPBOX, and WP:GREATWRONGS: WP does not use the official, long, formal, or otherwise non-concise or awkward name of something simply because it's "official". We use the most common name found in reliable and independent sources (Hint: band and label promo materials, fan sites, etc., are not independent sources. Even music-industry magazines are not, since the vast majority of their income is from label advertising, and they go out of their way to mimic logo and title stylization; see MOS:TM point, below.) While a WP:COMMONNAME analysis is mostly applied to selecting the base article title, the same principle applies to disambiguators – it's "(singer)" not "(chanteuse)" or "(crooner)". WP follows well-attested formal written English usage in reliable sources; it does not try to change it (see WP:SOAPBOX, WP:GREATWRONGS, WP:TRUTH, etc.). "I was listening to a The Black Eyed Peas song" is definitely not idiomatic in English, written or spoken, yet this is the same adjectival construction as in the overlong disambiguation. The common name of the band when used adjectivally in a such a construction does not include "The". At least after their name change, the common name of the band as a noun phrase usually does seem to include the definite article (as in "members of the Black Eyed Peas", only sometimes with a capitalized "The" when not starting a sentence with it). There's very clearly a WRONGS/TRUTH whiff in the air here. The above objections to the move are colored by sentiments about the "true name" of the band, a concern that has only limited import (cf. OFFICIALNAME and COMMONNAME) at the band's own article. It has no relevance at all for disambiguation. Disambiguation is a "minimized necessary evil" that is a navigational tool, nothing more. No parenthetical disambiguation is a fact about the world asserted by the encyclopedia, by policy (WP:V) definition, because you can't put a reference citation on a disambiguation. If we wanted to, we could switch to an entirely different arbitary DAB system, like IMDb's numbers. But Alive (Black Eyed Peas song) is much more helpful to readers and easier to maintain than something like "Alive (5)".
  • WP:DISAMBIGUATION and WP:PARENDIS: As noted in my much shorter comment above, parenthetical disambiguators often do not exactly match the title of the main article, and sometimes should not. One obvious example is "(footballer)" versus Football (despite the contrary preference of a couple of stubborn wikiprojects for doing things like "John Smith (baseball)" which is awkward and itself ambiguous, suggesting a brand name of sporting goods.) Another obvious example is "(UK)" or "(British)" versus United Kingdom. The kind of syntactic change made from "football" to "footballer" or from "United Kingdom" to "UK" is similar to that involved in dropping an unnecessary "The" from a noun phrase that's been repurposed as an adjectival modifier. Furthermore, disambiguation is only done where necessary and to the extent necessary. Our no. 1 DAB-related cleanup activity is making them more concise. This fact and practice militate against tacking on indefinite or definite articles except where absolutely necessary. Adding in extra words because they seem more "official" or are what the subject or its fans most like to see is over-disambiguation (and also a form of the specialized-style fallacy).
  • MOS:TM: WP rejects the forced stylization of names to satisfy the whims of trademark holders and such (or their fans), when it runs counter to actual English language usage. We almost never permit style quirks; only when reliable, independent sources do it with regard to that one subject with nearly uniform consistency (thus Deadmau5 and iPod but not P!nk for Pink (singer), SONY for Sony, etc.).
  • Obviously, WP:THE: we drop "The" from the front of things in virtually all cases (other than the titles of published works, as a class), unless there are very, very good reasons to make an exception (e.g. The Hague). This is not such a case, it's just fan handwaving.
  • WP:CONSENSUS (especially WP:FORUMSHOP), plus WP:GAMING, WP:WINNING, WP:TE, WP:NOTGETTINGIT, etc.: Unless consensus seems very likely to change due to new facts, the WP community frowns on "relitigating" the exact same trivial peccadillo over and over again by raising it on a new talk page with a minor detail change. A large proportion of bands "officially" have The in front of their name (when used as a noun). Concision moves like this one should be done speedily via WP:RM/TR, and RMs to add or re-add The should be speedily closed as perennial rehash, lest "gimme a The" proposals be raised over and over as a war of attrition, wearing down opposition.
  • Relatedly, see also the WP:Common sense meta-policy: Retaining this article at Alive (The Black Eyed Peas song) would be likely – as some kind of fandom "rallying cry" against WP:THE and related policies and guidelines as applied to pop music or pop culture – to reopen years of exceedingly tiresome re-re-re-debate over Beatles works and a zillion others. Just don't go there. We have title and style policies and guidelines for one principal reason: to forestall rearguing the same quibbles endlessly, with increased "battle lines and trench-digging" behavior, disrupting numerous articles' talk pages, and stealing time and energy away from adding and improving actual content. So, a refresher review of the WP:Policies and guidelines policy and the WP:ENC principles may also be in order.
  • PS, to pre-address any WP:IAR gambit: Some plausible exceptions to this The-dropping norm in adjectival use are probably A) the band The The, and B) bands named in the form "The Foo" when some other notable band is named just "Foo", requiring "The" to be kept for the former, for disambiguation reasons. Even then, it would only be done that way (rather than by some other disambiguation method) if both of the bands – and more importantly (per WP:V/WP:RS/WP:NOR/WP:INDY and WP:OFFICIALNAME) the reliable, independent sources we cite about the bands – were extremely consistent in making this distinction. Otherwise, such a quasi-distinction does not pass WP:SMALLDETAILS policy. It almost never does with The, as our article titles and disambiguation pages clearly demonstrate. An argument can be made that this The is actually a dismal disambiguation failure, in a "meta" sense; it is easy to misinterpret as a general titling house rule, and if spread to various similar articles, it could easily lead people to start creating articles at mis-titles, like "Foo Bar Baz (The David Bowie song)". The mistake would even make some sense, being interpreted as a subtitle, thus given an initial capital letter.

    To pre-debunk a similar point: No, a band name is not just like a title of a published work. Those are treated differently on Wikipedia, in all comprehensive style guides, and in reliable sources. E.g., one writes (and formally speaks) of "J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit"; using "J. R. R. Tolkien's Hobbit" will only be encountered in informal speech, and is ambiguous (which Hobbit? Frodo? Bilbo?). Even so, The can in fact still sometimes be adjectivally dropped even for work titles (so it sure as hell can be for band names): "The Sword of Shannara, Dungeons & Dragons, and Morrowind all show a strong Lord of the Rings influence." (It happens in this construction because of the "a" before "strong" usurping the need for/expectation of a definite article before "Lord ".) This is more of an informal reviewer/journalist opinion-piece style, which we wouldn't actually use on WP (try "According to [sources], The Lord of the Rings strongly influenced the creators of ...").

    Finally, I'll also address the point that was raised along the lines of "the band's official name once was just Black Eyed Peas, so people will think WP is outdated": Nah, it's just consistent with our dropping of extraneous leading-The for almost every case. Anyone familiar with WP has already intuited this impossible-to-not-notice-quickly fact (which is also a feature of many other works), and everyone we're writing for is already familiar with WP or soon will be, since it's among the top 3–7 most used websites in the world (depending on whose stats by what metrics). And WP is obviously not outdated with regard to the band's name and the history of it, if the lead of the article gives the current one in the very first sentence. Let's not be silly. Further, the "they changed the spelling" argument is actually an argument against including The, in WP's long-established house style procedures (see MOS:TM, MOS:CAPS, WP:NCCAPS, etc., plus WP:CONCISE, WP:PRECISE, and WP:RECOGNIZABLE again): If a stylistic matter is optional and if either the subject or the sources do not very consistently apply it to this subject, then WP doesn't either, because the simpler/shorter version already satisfies the WP:CRITERIA (and also, incidentally, the KISS principle and the principle of least astonishment). You'll even find a variant of this logic (about what the name is vs. how it's styled) in WP:COMMONNAME itself. And see again WP:OFFICIALNAME; "this name or variant of the name is newer" is never a guarantee that WP will prefer the new one, much less prefer it in contexts where it's not helpful.

I think that covers everything.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  10:14, 6 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The above close was premature. Please undo it. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:56, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@SmokeyJoe The RM has been open for 15 days and was relisted 8 days ago. How is the close "premature"? I am happy to reopen if there is a good reason, but as consensus seems unlikely to develop in either case, and this really has been open plenty long already, I don't see the point in further discussion here. Especially in context of the RM over at Talk:Aftermath_(The_Rolling_Stones_album), this sort of thing really should be decided by an RfC on policy clarification, not by a hundred different RMs. — InsertCleverPhraseHere 09:53, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Premature given the recent developing discussion. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:22, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Given the extended discussion over at Talk:Aftermath_(The_Rolling_Stones_album), which was posted by the same editor on the same day and is essentially about the same issue, this policy really needs to be discussed at a higher policy level, discussion here is not going to result in consensus, and even if by a miracle I relist this and there is a pile on of 'support' it will only represent a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. This has run for two weeks, let it die without wasting any more time and devote your time instead to an RfC where we can actually get some clarity on what the policy should be (for the record, I personally would question why we need the "The" as well). I am loathe to reopen this and waste more time on a local issue when that effort could be better spent toward actually solving the problem at the root of this (lack of clarity in the WP:MUSICDAB guideline). If you insist, I will reopen. — InsertCleverPhraseHere 12:06, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
No I don't insist. I'm just slow to get up to speed. The The Rolling Stones discussion was news to me. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:59, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I guess the next question is where exactly to post the RfC. Presumably to the talk page at WP:MUSICDAB, with ntoifications far and wide to catch as many editors as possible. I suggest that SMcCandlish tackle the issue, as they seem very keen on the change and knowledgeable on the topic. I will note that while some editors have brought up this RfM with regards to this issue, that mediation request was to deal with weather a small "the" or a capital "The" was used when referring to the Beatles in text and as far as I can tell that decision has no bearing on weather or not to drop the "the" entirely in parenthetical disambiguations. Note also that this RfC would affect a large number of articles, including articles related to The Cure, The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Band (this one might be an exception in any case), and many, many more obscure bands you've never heard of (i.e. The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Guess Who). The default seems to be to include "The" in the dab in all except for articles concerning The Beatles, which was the result of a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. This suggested change could affect potentially thousands of articles. — InsertCleverPhraseHere 23:24, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I agree it's an RfC thing. Also agree it should be well-advertised, since (like many style matters) it could affect a large number of articles, and the dispute verges on something to list at WP:PERENNIAL. I would strongly suggest RfCing it at WP:VPPOL and listing it at WP:CENT; the WT:MUSICDAB page is a backwater. Also agree The Band, like The The, is a good exception (if consensus generally favored dropping the "The" in these constructions, which is what I suspect the outcome would be – the quibbles raised about a few of my points do not surmount the rest of them). I can write an RfC for this; though I clearly have a strong opinion on the matter, I'm pretty practiced in writing neutral RfCs (and making it clear why one is a VPPOL matters, when necessary). Are there any other prior discussions that should be highlighted? This is not something I've deeply researched the history of, I just know from personal memory that people have been arguing about "The [Whatever]" with regard to bands for a long time.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  16:19, 10 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
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