Talk:Blue Guitars (Stephen Bishop album)

Notability

Keesling, this article also shows no sign of meeting WP:NALBUM or WP:GNG. Can you establish that it does? Best wishes, Boleyn (talk) 19:16, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Boleyn, I am a very new user (I wrote my first article last week) and must admit that I am not sure how I should adequately establish the notability of this article.

I have read the various notability guidelines many times, before I started writing articles, during the writing process and, again, after your post above, and find them very subjective and occasionally contradictory. What follows are my reasons for believing this stand-alone article should continue to exist:

• The sources which were cited in the article, AllMusic, Discogs and The Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, are all reliable, secondary sources which are independent of the subject. As such, the subject is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article per the first sentence of the General Notability Guidelines.
• The article is within the scope of WikiProject Albums, which is "dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of all kinds of musical albums." On the WikiProject Albums page, under Notability, it states: "Many consider any original studio album by a notable artist to be important enough to deserve an article; other editors follow stricter guidelines." I would be a member of the many in the former group.
• The artist who recorded the subject album, Stephen Bishop, has had several charting singles, gold and platinum albums, been nominated for Grammy and Academy awards and his songs have been recorded by many major artists (Barbra Streisand, Art Garfunkel, Phil Collins). I understand that this does not make this particular album notable per the Notability Guidelines for Recordings. However, it is consistent with the general practice in Wikipedia of including stand-alone articles for all original albums of notable artists. In my opinion, this internationally released, still available album is at least as notable as self-released, live albums by the group America and never released to the public, demo tapes by the group Barenaked Ladies. (The aforementioned examples have stand-alone articles without notability warnings.)

If an album does not merit its own stand-alone article, the WikiProject Albums guidelines suggest its information be merged into the artist's main article. If the article for this album, and those for the eleven other Stephen Bishop albums, are not notable, moving all of their information to the main article could be done. From a practical standpoint, this alternative does not seem to be the best solution.

At the end of the day, the overall worth of this article could be debated by reasonable individuals with different outcomes due to the subjective nature of the notability guidelines. If I thought that this album wasn't notable, I probably would not have purchased it and definitely would not have expended the effort to write the Wikipedia article (and all of the above).

As I mentioned before, I am very new to all this. I was hoping to contribute further to the WikiProject Albums by adding more albums which are currently not found in Wikipedia. Before I do, I need to know how to proceed correctly. I welcome whatever guidance and insight you can provide. Thank you for your attention. Keesling (talk) 08:54, 11 June 2015 (UTC)