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RfC: Italics for Pitchfork (website) magazine?

The consensus is that Pitchfork should be italicized in this article under MOS:MAJORWORK because it is the title of a major work. Cunard (talk) 05:22, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

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

Should Pitchfork be italicized in this article? Dan56 (talk) 15:45, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Votes

  • Yes - Pitchfork publishes their content at regular intervals, thus being a periodical; as defined by Merriam-Webster, "a periodical published online" is a magazine; magazines ought to be italicized (MOS:MAJORWORK). Dan56 (talk) 15:45, 23 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Of course. And not in just in this article. (And so should AllMusic for that matter. "Online magazines, newspapers, and news sites with original content should generally be italicized.") Making a distinction is pointless and confusing. Yintan  16:17, 23 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Yes — Dan56 presents a succinct and satisfying argument that I 100% endorse. For anyone coming to this discussion for the first time, my more digressive argument can be found in the discussion below, where (fair warning) I got a bit into the weeds. I wanted to anticipate plausible counterarguments and unpack some of the background. The gist of what I said: in the last decade or two, the quibble over whether to treat online-only publications as "major works" unfolded alongside major changes in technology, media consumption, and the publishing marketplace. By 2016, I would say there is solid consensus that Pitchfork is a magazine, and further that most online-only publications (especially those that are journalistic or periodical) should be considered major works akin to traditional print media. If this RfC discussion receives solid attention and consensus, I hope the reasoning can be broadly applied so that other online periodical publications that currently go unitalicized (like Allmusic, Vox, and I'm sure several more) will be considered "major works" that qualify for italicization. —BLZ · talk 16:25, 23 December 2016 (UTC)
  • This is not the right place to start a discussion about this as this doesn't only concern this article. This should be copied/pasted on the wikiproject album discussion page Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Albums Woovee (talk) 13:07, 24 December 2016 (UTC)
  • No - None of their albums reviews have been published. There was never a physical copy of a periodical magazine named as Pitchfork. There are just a few music books in existence with the Pitchfork label. Woovee (talk) 13:07, 24 December 2016 (UTC)
  • This RfC may be referred to anywhere else; venue doesn't matter, since the RfC gathers by way of topic ("Media" in this case) regardless of where it's posted. Three or four editors have disputed and reverted your changes on this article; the burden is on you to get a consensus that favors your changes, not the other way around. And your conceptualization of "publishing" and "periodical" are sadly limited, and your stubbornly avoiding expanding it :( --> "a periodical published online" (Merriam-Webster's definition of "magazine") @Woovee: Dan56 (talk) 17:10, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Discussion

  • Italics should be used for the following types of names and titles, or abbreviations thereof:

[1]: Major works of art and artifice, such as albums, books, video games, films, musicals, operas, symphonies, paintings, sculptures, newspapers, journals, magazines, epic poems, plays, television programs, radio shows. Medium of publication or presentation is not a factor; a video feature only released on video tape, disc or the Internet is considered a "film" for these purposes, and so on. Pitchfork is a magazine; medium of being online website does not matter; still haz italics... Fylbecatulous talk 01:20, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

Same problem with Closer. Mauro Lanari. ---82.84.28.243 (talk) 02:06, 25 November 2016 (UTC)
@Fylbecatulous: Thanks for that. I was watching the Pitchfork vs Pitchfork edit war in amazement. Also found this in WP:MOS [2]: Online magazines, newspapers, and news sites with original content should generally be italicized (Salon.com or The Huffington Post). Can't make things any clearer, I guess. Italics it is. Yintan  04:43, 25 November 2016 (UTC)
@Mauro Lanari:I fixed Closer. Yintan  05:28, 25 November 2016 (UTC)
  • Read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Album_ratings and take as instances all the wp:FA and wp:GA articles about albums. Users have always made a difference. If you want to make such changes, open a discussion on wiki project albums and if you get a large consensus, you could apply those changes. Til then, you can't. Note that Wikipedia:Manual of Style is not a wp:policy of wikipedia, it is just a wp:guideline. check the difference between policy and guideline: a policy is for instance "no WP:OR", you always have to apply this rule. Manual of style is just a guideline... You won't find any wp:FA and wp:GA where Allmusic appears in Italics for the Album ratings. Woovee (talk) 01:51, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
@Woovee: The whole policy vs guideline debate is always causing trouble like this, it's one of Wiki's weakest 'rules'. You take the Italics off Pitchfork, someone else will put them on again, and this whole debate will start again. And again. Happens all the time in numerous areas and articles. I seriously have better things to do than to get into an endless edit war about something as trivial as this. Yintan  06:26, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
@Woovee: @Yintan: I'd like to add something that might clear up some of the confusion. Pitchfork has undergone a rebrand in recent years. They changed names from "Pitchfork Media" to just "Pitchfork," redesigned the website twice, and got bought by Condé Nast, a fairly esteemed publisher of media (most prominently, magazines). This transition has taken Pitchfork from the vague "blog" or "publisher" category (which might go unitalicized) to the "online magazine" category. When it first got a Wikipedia article and was cited on Wikipedia, it was cited as Pitchfork Media unitalicized, probably because it was less clear then whether "online-exclusive magazine" was a tenable category of media. Even if it was still called Pitchfork Media and hadn't undergone the other formal changes to its brand, I would still suggest that it should be italicized as Pitchfork Media now that the world has caught up with its concept; with those changes, I think it is totally unambiguous that it is now conceived as a magazine and should be italicized as such.
Side note: to the extent that a "publication" like Pitchfork could be seen as a "blog" (either their current iteration or pre-rebrand, when their content model was virtually the same), such a use of the word "blog" is mostly a mid-to-late 00s remnant, when the term was new and its meaning wide open. Nowadays, "blog" tends to denote an individual/personal publication (take writer Sam Kriss's website, where he publishes his essays that haven't been run by major magazines, where his work might ordinarily be found); a publication more closely analogous to a zine (for example, experimental music blog The Out Door, which was once a column at Pitchfork); or a section on a website that contains posts (think posts by a non-publishing brand, like a consultant's musings on business or a sandwich shop's photos of sandwiches). In contemporary usage, "blog" would not usually cover an institutional, commercial, magazine-like online publication like Pitchfork.
AllMusic is a little different in that they started as a print reference book, and so it is best conceptualized as a reference work rather than a magazine, despite regularly publishing new entries. However, given its close analogy to reference works (which like Encyclopaedia Britannica should be italicized), I don't see a good reason to leave it unitalicized either. —BLZ · talk 15:40, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
@Brandt Luke Zorn:I fully agree and thanks for your effort. Yintan  16:00, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
If you look at this list, you'll find that almost every website doesn't have the article title italicized, while Wired (website) and just Pitchfork (website) are an exception and I don't know why. Mauro Lanari --82.84.27.22 (talk) 16:20, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
But Pitchfork has never been considered a blog: from day one in the late 1990s, it was recognized as a serious site with long well written reviews. Allmusic has never been seen a blog either. The difference, between music websites written in italics and others written normally, hasn't got anything to do with any notability or the concept of wp:RS: it is because certain music sites have always existed as music websites. Rolling Stone still has got a physical issue. Note that a blog can't be used as a source in any capacity. Woovee (talk) 23:42, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

@Woovee: @Yintan: I understand where you're coming from, but I think we have a semantical misunderstanding which I'll unpack. First, I didn't mean to suggest that Pitchfork had once been a blog in my own view, or that that would have anything to do with its notability; I was trying to say that from a particular frame of reference (that frame being mainstream, mid-to-late-00s, common-sense understanding of emerging online journalism), what Pitchfork was could be understood to be a "blog". Using "blog" this way wasn't exactly correct, but there was an informal idea that "blog" was an appropriate term to use for online-only publications regardless of their notability, content, etc., and I especially want to distinguish my use of the evolving concept behind the word "blog" from the specific internal definition used within Wikipedia policy w/r/t notability. I think what I mean when I talk about the 00s definition/understanding of the use and connotation of the word "blog" is retained in your use of "site" or "website" to refer to Pitchfork, and I'll explain why that distinction is not a good one and why being a "site" doesn't mean something can't also a magazine.

I'd say there's no doubt that Pitchfork is a site. But, it is not a site rather than a magazine — kinda like how Amazon isn't a site rather than a retailer. The term "site" is more about the mechanics of what the web is (you usually go to pitchfork.com or click a link to there from social media) rather than a medium. The word "site" did pick up some connotations in usage that made the term medium-like; in this sense of the word "site," there was an overlapping definition with "online magazine." Using "site" like this is more than just a technical truism about the bare fact of a website, and "site" in this sense would in fact a description of the online medium itself, a publication-as-online-destination ("It's a site I go to online to read about music," something a person might say.) However, as I said it had overlapping meaning with "online magazine," and in competition with each other "magazine" has emerged triumphant in media discourse. "Magazine" has far surpassed "site" in the competition for what term will be used, especially in any kind of formalized sense rather than just conversation.

Final thought on the idea of "site" as a cognizable medium in opposition to "magazine" and how that affects italicizing: remember here too that the original decision not to italicize so-called "sites" had a lot to do with a tentative unsureness about what might develop on the web in the near future. The decision was, I'd argue, more of a "wait and see" attitude rather than a firm, definitive no to the idea that online-only publications could be magazines — and even if the decision was intended or perceived as a hard no, it has been proven wrong over time regardless. Therefore, even to the extent that "site" still has currency as a medium of online publishing, that doesn't mean we shouldn't still be italicizing the titles of such publications, because whatever "sites" are, they are still publications or "major works" as outlined in Wikipedia policy, closely analogous to newspaper or magazine, and should be italicized. So if you ask me, something like Vox — a publication more newspaper-like than a magazine due to its frequency of posting, but maybe not exactly a newspaper either due its pervasive magazine-like editorializing and commentary — I'd still say it's more useful to call it a "publication," not a site) should also be italicized — and it is in fact italicized by some publications, as it is in this essay about Vox from Current Affairs.

So "site" and "magazine" are not mutually exclusive in the first place, but also, "magazine" is more specific and meaningful to understand what kind of publication/product Pitchfork is than "site" anyway. It's more meaningful because "site" is a print-web distinction, whereas "magazine" (or newspaper, journal, etc) are medium distinctions. The newness of online publications had us thinking about print-web distinctions, rather than the distinctions between media categories. Now, the consensus is that many of the category-concepts like "magazine" or "newspaper" inherited our traditional print media map in a pretty straightforward way to new online-only publications. It used to be an open question whether an online-only or online-first publication could be considered a magazine. That question has largely settled in recent years, from various vantage points: most readers/consumers would understand Pitchfork to be a magazine (or, even if they wouldn't call it a magazine unprompted, they'd see that it is a product with similar content to what is expected from magazines, and their interaction with/consumption of Pitchfork is much like how they'd consume a traditional magazine product); Condé Nast officially considers Pitchfork to be a magazine property; I'm sure most of the editors, journalists, and critics working for Pitchfork self-conceptualize their work as magazine work. The understanding an "online magazine" is a "magazine" has developed somewhat recently, but it's pretty definitively settled now.

In my original post, my reason for referring to that mid-00s frame of reference about online publications in the first place because that would have been how people were thinking when drafting those Wikipedia policies about a decade or more ago. I think the choice to not italicize publications like Pitchfork is an artifact of that mid-00s perspective that has stuck with us even as a decade of change in online publishing (and Pitchfork itself!) has occurred. I started editing Wikipedia in 2007, when that question about whether a "magazine" can be online-only was less clear, and went along with the policy not to italicize Pitchfork (then still Pitchfork Media) because it was a relatively minor issue (it still is) and, although I found it a bit confusing, it made enough sense at the time. Now a decade has passed, the ways we consume news and media have transformed radically, I've been through journalism school, Pitchfork itself has undergone many changes, and yet those policies remain unchanged. I think at this point it's silly and Pitchfork should be italicized in all usages on the site. (If you're wondering why I bothered to write all this out here, it's to cite in discussion to change the Wikipedia policy at some point so we get more consistency on this rule.) —BLZ · talk 19:24, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

I've tagged this as an RfC @Yintan:, @Brandt Luke Zorn: Dan56 (talk) 15:51, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

This should be discussed here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Albums Woovee (talk) 13:10, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Why? The only article where anyone is disputing italicizing Pitchfork is this one. Dan56 (talk) 17:19, 24 December 2016 (UTC)
I've notified the Wikiproject here. —BLZ · talk 18:56, 25 December 2016 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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