Folk metal
This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I have dramatically expanded this article to what I believe is a rather high standard with photos, music samples and most importantly, references throughout the article for each and every point made. I would particularly like to receive some feedback on the sentence flow of the article and whether it can be improved further.
Thanks, Bardin (talk) 14:51, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Comments from Kakofonous (talk · contribs) edit
I'm in the midst of doing some copy editing and formatting on the article as I write this, but these are some things I've noticed.
- With all the media (pictures, sound samples) the article is getting a bit cluttered, and I wonder if there are some extraneous elements that could be removed for better text flow.
- Some references do not seem necessary and often clog up the text flow, like using separate references (or even refs at all) for the years that various bands became popular, the countries they come from, or which bands incorporate x or y instrument or singing style in their music.
- I notice nothing but positive reviews and information about the bands and style. Have there been critics opposed to either? Kakofonous (talk) 22:26, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
- Hey there. Thanks for doing a peer review of the article. In regards to your point,
- I was using the featured article heavy metal music as my guide. It's a bit longer than the folk metal article but not by much (92 kbs to 76 kbs). There's ten music samples there and I've used nine in folk metal. Each of the samples are there to demonstrate a particular point or in some cases, more than one point. On the other hand, the pictures are mostly there just to make the article look nicer. Only the album cover from Skyclad's first album is really essential although I think the photos of Subway to Sally and Skyforger with a folk instrument is pretty important too. There's 12 photos in the heavy metal music article and ten in the folk metal article. For the history section, I felt having a photo and music sample for each of the regional variation was important to give them equal weight and avoid any suggestion of one being more important than the other. I do not feel that the article is cluttered but if you really think it is, I can probably take one or two photos out. Probably the Suidakra and Finntroll photos.
- I moved some pictures and sound samples around to make the visual layout a bit less complicated and I don't now think that there's a need to take anything out.
- I wasn't really sure whether all the references were needed but I didn't want anyone to put up a citation needed tag on any of the points made. If you think it would be better, I can group all the references in a sentence together at the end under one tag like I did on the previous version of the folk metal article as seen here. The only problem with that is it would make the references section even longer since I would not be able to cite the same footnotes repeatedly.
- That wouldn't make anything better or worse—seems better just to leave them for at least the time being.
- I didn't make a conscious decision to only use positive reviews. I believe all of Chad Bower's reviews on About.com are positive. I did came across perhaps three or four negative reviews of a folk metal album on Allmusic.com. One of them was the review for the Falconer album that I used in reference for the yo-ho-ho folk melodies sentence. I think the review for Finntroll's first or second album was negative too. I can't recall seeing any negative reviews on a metal specialist website. Especially for something like Orphaned Land or Melechesh, every single review I came across was positive. I suspect it's probably because with a music niche like this, people aren't going to waste their time featuring it on their website if they didn't thought it was good or interesting in the first place. Some of the music like Mago de Oz and Subway to Sally might be mainstream in their home country but they certainly aren't on the internet. Whereas with more well known music styles or acts, negative reviews would be more common since there is more awareness of the bands and an expectation for websites to review their albums. It didn't really occured to me to particularly look or use any negative review since I wasn't really quoting any positive review for the positive spin but whatever other point that the reviewer was making. Except for the Skyclad album that opened the article. The article did end off by saying that folk metal might not be for everyone's taste by using an otherwise review of a Turisas album. I will try to add a passage at the end of the history section to cover the popularity and reception of the genre, making note that the mix of folk and metal has not been welcomed by everyone.--Bardin (talk) 03:59, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
- Sounds like a good plan. Thanks for responding so thoroughly to my comments! This is what makes a peer review truly productive. --Kakofonous (talk) 12:34, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
- I was using the featured article heavy metal music as my guide. It's a bit longer than the folk metal article but not by much (92 kbs to 76 kbs). There's ten music samples there and I've used nine in folk metal. Each of the samples are there to demonstrate a particular point or in some cases, more than one point. On the other hand, the pictures are mostly there just to make the article look nicer. Only the album cover from Skyclad's first album is really essential although I think the photos of Subway to Sally and Skyforger with a folk instrument is pretty important too. There's 12 photos in the heavy metal music article and ten in the folk metal article. For the history section, I felt having a photo and music sample for each of the regional variation was important to give them equal weight and avoid any suggestion of one being more important than the other. I do not feel that the article is cluttered but if you really think it is, I can probably take one or two photos out. Probably the Suidakra and Finntroll photos.
- No problem. I appreciate any constructive feedback that I can receive since it will only help me in future when I work on other articles.
- I've been experiencing some difficulty finding negative reviews. The websites that specialise on heavy metal music are a bit hopeless for this since their reviews tend to be positive or at the very least neutral. I do get the impression that some critics like Lordsofmetal's Vera Matthijssens and Metalcoven's Britton Dicks are big fans of the genre themselves so there might be some bias in their reviews. About.com's Chad Bowar is probably not a big fan of the genre but his reviews tend to be descriptive rather than evaluative. That basically leaves Allmusic.com but there's not a lot of folk metal albums that have been reviewed on that website. Another problem is that reviewers tend to focus on the band rather than the genre of folk metal. Not surprisingly since there's not much of a common ground in folk metal. It is for this reason I couldn't find a use for the negative comments on the Falconer review I mentioned above since the negative comments are pretty much directed to the band's supposedly overblown power metal rather than anything specifically on their use of folk music. The only thing that I found that's of some use is the one negative review of a Finntroll album on allmusic.com where the critic laments the specific use of polka in the music. That's relevant to the genre but it's not enough to build a new passage on critical reception so I inserted it in the passage about Finntroll instead. If you've got any suggestion on this, I'd like to hear it.
- I also appreciate your taking the time to rearrange the photos and music samples on the article. I agree that it looks better overall except for one particular thing and that's the grouping of three music samples representative of the oriental, medieval and celtic variations. It makes the passage for Orphaned Land looks a bit cluttered right now. I'm also inclined to think that each music sample for a particular variation should be inserted where the discussion of that variation is placed. That said, I'm going to defer to your experience and refrain myself from changing the layout. --Bardin (talk) 07:42, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
- I disagree strongly with the use of quotes at the beginning of sections as is done here. This elevates a particular source's views and gives in implicit value above any other views, and is thus inherently un-neutral, unless there's something specifically relevant about the quotation in question (e.g. if it's a quote that is itself famous and relevant). Tuf-Kat (talk) 02:38, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
- I do not understand why you would disagree strongly with the use of quotes when there's nothing controversial about any of the person being quoted or the comments being quoted. There's no substantive difference between the stuff being quoted in full and the other stuff in the article that's based on an interview with a band member. The quotes are there as eye candy. It makes the article look more attractive to me. The stuff being quoted are completely harmless. It's not as if there's anybody out there that disagrees with Martin Walkyier's saying that it has always been his heartfelt dream to see heavy metal and folk music mixed. I do not see why anyone would object to a member of Subway to Sally commenting that his band gets a mixed audience in concerts. And so on and so forth. Who am I elevating with these quotes and what exactly am I elevating them over? Do you think a member of another band is going to come on wikipedia and complain that the article is not using some quote from him or her instead? Your objection might have some relevance in an article concerning something controversial or contentious. There's nothing of that kind here. --Bardin (talk) 10:56, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
- There is a huge difference between quoting somebody ordinarily and putting their quote in a big special font at the beginning of a section. The former provides information, which is good, the latter places special emphasis on the sources being quoted. Yes, a member of another band might object to a quote from their group not being given that special emphasis, as might any scholar or critic who has written about folk metal. As an example, the quote: "At our concerts, you get people with little bells on their ankles bumping into people wearing studded armbands." - the relevance of this info is never explained, so the the reader must guess why Eric Fish thinks this is important, and not just important, but so important that it the only quote needed to describe the "Mittlealter rock" genre. Why not "enriched with medieval melodies enmeshed in the songs via bagpipes, hurdy-gurdy, lute, mandoline, shalm, fiddle and flute" - this gives actual info on what the genre sounded like, rather than what the fans wore? Tuf-Kat (talk) 04:34, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
- I think you're reading too much into the quotes. I see no reason to assume that the sentences being quoted are supposed to be of some importance rather than mere eye candy to tantalize the reader. The importance of Skyclad, Cruachan, Orphaned Land and Subway to Sally are all explained in the article itself so I do not see how the use of a quote from each of these bands emphasise them anymore than the article already does. Nor do I see why anyone reading these quotes would assume that the source of a quote must necessarily think that the phrase being quoted is important. I think the Eric Fish comment is fairly self-explanatory. He notes that his concerts attract an audience that consists of both people who are into medieval music and people who are into metal music.
- So I'm still not clear as to how the use of the quotes in this manner is contradictory to wikipedia's policy on neutral point of view. If you can point me to a passage on that policy article that indicates as much, I will willingly remove those quotes without any fuss. I note however that other articles have been promoted to featured article status while featuring quotes in a similar manner as that used on the folk metal article. The Battle of Greece opens with a quote from Benito Mussolini. No explanation is provided as to the relevance of the quote nor I presume has there been any suggestion that the use of a quote from Mussolini and not Hitler or Metaxas somehow places special emphasis on the viewpoint of Mussolini. Other similar quotes are littered throughout that article. The article for the band U2 also makes prominent use of quotes not just from the band members but other sources including the Rolling Stones, Brian Eno and an author named Caroline van oosten de Boer. No explanation is provided as to the importance of these individuals or why their viewpoints should deserve some special emphasis by being quoted at length. Furthermore, the quotes from those three sources all consist of positive remarks regarding the band U2 while none of the quotes I provided in the folk metal article give a positive spin on anything in my view. --Bardin (talk) 11:25, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
- I disagree with the use of set-aside quotes in those articles too. Battle of Greece isn't as bad because because those quotes are about the issues discussed in the article (e.g. Mussolini talking about why he was going to invade Greece); similarly U2 contains quotes which discuss major topics described in the article. The quotes at folk metal are pretty vague and of no real importance (e.g. "The music is so strange that the results are strange as well, to see Arab people liking an Israeli band." - the strangeness is not mentioned elsewhere, nor does it appear to be a very important topic, as the presence of Arab fans is not presented as relevant in the text). WP:NPOV implicitly argues against this sort of quoting at Wikipedia:Neutral point of view#Article_structure - ""Segregation" of text or other content into different regions or subsections, based solely on the apparent POV of the content itself". The quotes are segregated from the rest of the text, and there is no apparent reason for it (because neither the quotes themselves nor the information they present appears to be of any real importance) aside from bringing special attention to those quotes and the opinions presented in them beyond the attention given to other quotes and opinions presented within the normal article body. You are missing the point regarding the Eric Fish quote - you and I understand the relevance of people wearing studded armbands and people with bells on their ankles, but not all readers will because it isn't stated explicitly, and not everyone has the same cultural background we do - encyclopedias don't imply facts, they state them. Tuf-Kat (talk) 15:39, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
- There is a huge difference between quoting somebody ordinarily and putting their quote in a big special font at the beginning of a section. The former provides information, which is good, the latter places special emphasis on the sources being quoted. Yes, a member of another band might object to a quote from their group not being given that special emphasis, as might any scholar or critic who has written about folk metal. As an example, the quote: "At our concerts, you get people with little bells on their ankles bumping into people wearing studded armbands." - the relevance of this info is never explained, so the the reader must guess why Eric Fish thinks this is important, and not just important, but so important that it the only quote needed to describe the "Mittlealter rock" genre. Why not "enriched with medieval melodies enmeshed in the songs via bagpipes, hurdy-gurdy, lute, mandoline, shalm, fiddle and flute" - this gives actual info on what the genre sounded like, rather than what the fans wore? Tuf-Kat (talk) 04:34, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
- Comment Is "folk metal" recognized as including the three regional variations mentioned in this article and no other, or is it a more general term and these are the three named regional variations? If the latter, is it possible there are regional variations this article's editors don't know about? (Well, I guess it's always possible, but how possible is it?) Tuf-Kat (talk) 19:48, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
- Okay, I've removed three of the five quotes from the article. I've left the other two in the article because I feel they do have some relevance to the subject, particularly the one regarding the explosion of the genre. One of the problems that I had with working on this article is that there's very little written material that are specifically on folk metal. That's why I had to constantly build sentences with multiple examples as support. So there's nothing as far as I know that explicitly says that the subgenres or variations of folk metal are so-and-so. The closest thing is probably rockdetector.com where Orphaned Land, Subway to Sally and Cruachan are all tagged as folk metal along with other bands from their respective variations/subgenres. In interviews with band members, celtic metal is the one that's most often associated with folk metal but that's not surprising because there's more english interviews online for celtic metal than either oriental or medieval metal (the latter is almost always in German while the former does not have as large a presence on the internet as Celtic metal).
- It is entirely possible for other regional variations to exist without my awareness (and in all honesty, I am the only active editor of the article right now). If any other variation is brought to my attention then I'll certainly add them if there's reliable sources to support their presence on the folk metal article. I reckon though that if there are any other variation at the present time, then it's probably little known and hence might not be notable for inclusion on wikipedia. I've come across some terms that have been associated with folk metal like battle metal, troll metal and pirate metal but these are all neologism, obviously. I've also worked on the list of folk metal bands and by checking what links to folk metal article, I believe all the folk metal bands with an article page on wikipedia are on that list. When I searched online for references for each and every one of those bands on that list, I did not came across any suggestion of some other regional variation or subgenre of folk metal. --Bardin (talk) 02:07, 31 March 2008 (UTC)