The following discussion is preserved as an Archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this page.

Consensus seems to be in favour of keeping this deleted. I would not have closed this after only 6 days if it didn't seem so clear cut to me. Keep deleted. ++Lar: t/c 19:21, 10 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

List of people with absolute pitch[edit]

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of people with absolute pitch was closed as delete. I don't recognize many of the voters so I assume few regular music editors voted. The reasons given for deletion were "Unencyclopedic, unverifiable" with no explination. There never was any attempt at verification, so I'm not sure how this was determined. Reasons given by voters for deletion include the untrue ("In professional musicians and composers, having absolute pitch is commonplace", "Besides, it's perfect pitch") and indicate that voters had not read that article or were familiar enough with the topic. Hyacinth 07:19, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Speaking as one of those regular music editors, I know I didn't vote. There are a lot of lists on Wikipedia, and this seems like a sensible one. If someone wants to know some examples of people with absolute pitch, why not provide it? Gene Ward Smith 19:17, 10 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How would you source it? I know people with perfect pitch, but when you explore the issue you find that perfect often <> absolute. I am also always suspicious of unsourced lists, and dislike bare lists (i.e. lists which add nothing to what a category would provide) and lists which include both real and fictional characters. I endorse closure but could be persuaded otherwise if there were an obvious purpose to the list other than trivia, and if I were persuaded that there are reliable sources (i.e. qualified musicologists making the claim, not the people themselves). Just zis Guy you know? 11:43, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How do we source any information? Hyacinth 20:15, 5 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The biographies of many musicians often mention if they had absolute pitch, or even sometimes mention (Wagner would be an example) that they didn't have absolute pitch. If you want to find out if Pierre Boulez, for instance, has absolute pitch it's really not that hard; the difficulty lies in the number of people on the list. However, that is the way of lists. It seems to me the views of people who are interested in and know somthing about music ought to be given weight when the topic is music, BTW. Gene Ward Smith 19:17, 10 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• Endorse closure In the face of unanimous AfD consensus, I am forced to agree with JzG: while this is perhaps a nice concept for a list, I see no evidence of maintainability or verifiability here. Nominator is welcome to write a verifiable new list with limitations aimed at maintaining the list to a reasonable length. Xoloz 12:45, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Endorse closure. While it's conceivable that a couple AfD voters were confused about the meaning of the term, the vote was, y'know, unanimous. LotLE×talk 15:45, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Re-create with only verifiable examples of people with perfect pitch (Mozart, Slonimsky, Julie Andrews, ...), and only allowing sourced items to be added to the list. It's an encyclopedic topic, and references to whether or not a famous musician had or did not have perfect pitch are relatively easy to come by. I don't see the point in undeleting the article since none of the names have references, and for this kind of list, references are desperately needed. (You cannot add references to a category, which is why this kind of information needs to be maintained as a list.) Antandrus (talk) 16:55, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • You can, however, add references to an article to support addition to a category, and the editor community on that article will be likely to reject addition of a category which is not supported by evidence - whereas they may well not even notice addition to a list, cited or not. Just zis Guy you know? 18:51, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Not my experience. Unsupported additions to cats are quite common; lists can be watched, categories can't (and a lot of editors haven't read WP:Categories and don't understand the support requirements. Septentrionalis 22:51, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • But you don't need to watch the category itself. We just need to trust that the people watching the article on, for example, Thomas Edison will see the category tag added to their article and will recognize it for vandalism and revert it. If all the articles that feed a category are kept clean, then the category page itself will be automatically kept clean. It's a decentralized approach to control. Rossami (talk) 12:46, 5 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • "Trust but verify" - and it is significantly more difficult to check a cat and verify that the additions to it are not spam than to watch a list article. Septentrionalis 17:04, 5 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Endorse closure. The consensus was pretty clear. Many people have absolute pitch - I know around half a dozen (all amateur musicians). The list here would not grow too long as not all these are notable. The problem I think is that the coverage will be very patchy. Some vandal adds Bill Clinton to the list - well people may be able to check this I suppose. But then they add David Mellor. Who will be confident enough to revert it? The list will be suspect, and so not very useful. The category idea is also risky, but less prone to errors as editors will follow their favourite characters much more closely than a generic person said to have absolute pitch. Stephen B Streater 20:29, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Unfortunately, I must endorse closure although I would have voted against it. AfD must have the power to make mistakes. Partial exemption from G4: any recreation is going to resemble some form of this article for a while. Septentrionalis 22:51, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Endorse closure; while we could replace it with verifiable examples, it's still an unmaintainable list. Ral315 (talk) 03:59, 8 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Endorse closure as per JzG, unsourced list -- Samir (the scope) धर्म 05:14, 8 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• comment >I< have perfect pitch. Tis a nice thing to have, especially if one wants to for instance play the clarinet, and play along with a song one has never heard before. I don't think that this is an encyclopedic topic, and the verifiability even of those persons historically claimed to have perfect pitch is low. Further, perfect pitch is actually a spectrum of tone/metacognition faculties, and generating any kind of realistic set of proofs over them would be difficult or impossible, even assuming that you had the persons present in a room and were going to use scientific method and analysis. There are a lot of things in this world that can't be proven logically one way or the other. Encyclopedias do best to avoid those things. Prometheuspan 22:23, 9 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep deleted. Another example of misuse of the List function. I used to write quite a bit about this—to no effect, of course. —Encephalon 18:14, 10 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an Archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No further edits should be made to this page.