Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of prolific songwriters

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Yunshui ^雲 _水 10:29, 16 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

List of prolific songwriters

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Indiscriminate list with an ill-defined WP:LSC and an unfortunate WP:GEOBIAS towards Indian authors. "Where is Justin Bieber?", some might ask. Or "where is Leonard Cohen?", others might ask. Personally I'd prefer to ask something slightly more highbrow such as "Where is Goethe?" Or as 78.26 asked in an edit summary: "For instance, how do you not list Johnny Mercer or Irving Berlin?" I have never been a big fan of neither Mercer nor Berlin, but seriously, where are they? This list seems to be a "list of Indian poets I remember" with four North Americans, Bob Dylan, David Foster (!), Alicia Keys (are you kidding me!?) and Bruno Mars spliced into the list. If "prolific" is defined as someone who "has written at least 100 songs", then this list will soon be long. Delete per DEL5 as a content fork of whatever you can think about, the possibilities are endless. Sam Sailor 22:15, 9 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. Sam Sailor 22:16, 9 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Delete mostly per nom. Geobias can be fixed, but this list is un-maintainable, as the topic is too broad. 78.26 _{(spin me / revolutions)} 22:28, 9 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. WP:NOTINDISCRIMINATE. The title including the word prolific is a dead giveaway. Ajf773 (talk) 23:14, 9 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete -in it's current form, it follows only songwriters of India/Pakistan and North America, this misleading and very incomplete as a world wide list. C. W. Gilmore (talk) 05:38, 10 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect This listing should be narrowly focused on one region like the India sub-continent and kept.C. W. Gilmore (talk) 14:52, 12 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - I've added Indian artists because statistics about Indian lyricists are easily available in websites like hindigeetmala.net, muvyz.com or atulsongaday, but american lyricists' total song number are counted nowhere. I need time to add all the notable songwriters here. Thank you. মাখামাখি (talk) 09:53, 10 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Note: In order for this to be !kept it would have to be renamed as something like List of prolific songwriters from India. --Auric talk 01:22, 10 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- I disagree; renaming it to List of prolific songwriters from India would not be a prerequisite for keeping it, as it would not fix the inherent problems. Sam Sailor 12:47, 11 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom/78.26. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 10:49, 10 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - The article seems to be quite informative. It has two references that clearly shows Rabindranath Tagore wrote 2,232 songs and Sameer set Guinness record for 3,500+ songs. Moreorver, the article has improved since its creation when most of the entries were Indians, but Important american, UK and korean songwriters' credits have also been added. So, I think now this article is eligible for wikipedia. 8.37.225.63 (talk) 14:38, 10 January 2018 (UTC) — 8.37.225.63 (talk · contribs) has only contributed to the article(s) under discussion for deletion and AFD. In fact they have not even edited the article. Sam Sailor 13:03, 11 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What about Ghanian songwriters? Brazilian? Hawaiian? There are no polka musicians listed such as Gene Wisniewski, who recorded hundreds of polkas of his own. (Good luck finding a source on that one, by the way, until a discography of Dana Records is published). I appreciate the efforts, but the focus needs to be narrowed, not broadened. Even if this list were to be pared down to Indian musicians, India is a huge continent with a rich and multi-varied musical culture. Could several lists of Indian musicians be created, focusing on a particular region or genre? I don't want your work to be for naught, but I continue to believe that the humongous scope of this list makes it unsuitable for an encyclopedia. 78.26 _{(spin me / revolutions)} 15:26, 10 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - this is a list with fairly arbitrary inclusion criteria. Vorbee (talk) 17:24, 10 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. The scope of this could easily be reduced simply by raising the bar and narrowing the definition (does "song" mean a music track, as used by iTunes, or "a vocal composition sung with or without accompaniment", or something that is habitually called a "song" in reliable sources – Bach never wrote one of those, but he scores 954 in the table). But the concept is innately unencyclopaedic, and close to impossible to research, reference and maintain. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 00:23, 12 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Strongly Keep - The article has been improved since its creation. It covers nearly most of the famed songwriters with exact number of songs they written. So, I think this article should stay in Wikipedia. 8.37.225.53 (talk) 06:11, 12 January 2018 (UTC) — 8.37.225.53 (talk · contribs) has only contributed to the article(s) under discussion for deletion and AFD. [reply]
Delete per nom, MT Train^Discuss 07:55, 12 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: Also see List of prolific singers, a similar list article heavily biased towards Indian singers. MT Train^Discuss 09:24, 12 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Bands and musicians-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 04:38, 13 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Ill-conceived, arbitrary and impossible to maintain. Also, I'm sure closing admin will note the probability of either sockpuppetry or canvasing with the keep votes. ShelbyMarion (talk) 15:09, 13 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete -- WP:NOTINDISCRIMINATE & subjective criteria for inclusion. Does not meet WP:LISTN. K.e.coffman (talk) 23:10, 13 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete – the threshold provided (>100 songs) is, unfortunately, arbitrary. LaundryPizza03 (talk) 11:26, 14 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
EDIT: per @MT Train, I have also nominated List of prolific singers for deletion. LaundryPizza03 (talk) 11:34, 14 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Arbitrary and quite low definition of prolific. Full of unreferenced claims of records, suggesting WP:OR. Pburka (talk) 00:07, 15 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete What is a song? That is a really good question, and unless we have a universal answer that all agree on to the question, we cannot have this list. This especially gets tricky because some works were put to music in ways that did not closely connect to their composition. The number 100 is arbitrary. No one has demonstrated that reliable sources ever refer to "prolific songwriters" as an actual group, let alone that there is actual consensus on where the group starts. Beyond this, there is no indication that the work has to have been published. There are people who I could not even say for sure if they should go in here or not. For example Evan Stephens wrote at least 84 hymns and anthems. However that is the number of his works published in one particular hymnbook. It is not clear if there were others published in other works, or songs by him sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and never published in a hymnbook. Also, are song writers only those who create the words, or those who create the music as well. What of cases where one set of music has been used for multiple lyrics? This list is a mess waiting to happen. Total number of songs is hard to reliably source, this is just a huge mess.John Pack Lambert (talk) 05:04, 15 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.