Talk:Suddenly It's Christmas

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

While I agree what this is technically a 'single', in that there is only one song on it, I'm still not wholly convinced that the Wikipedia 'Single' template is the right thing to use here. First, I'm not sure that the distinction between 'album' and 'single' is completely thought out. Originally, in the "old days" of 78s, 45's and 33's there was an obvious distinction: a single was a single song, an 'Album' was a collection of singles. Later, an 'Album' was something released as a unit and a 'single' was one track plucked off of the album and released separately. In this case the track on this single was never released on any album. The song itself has only been released on the Bootleg series The Christmas Show 2004. What that means is that someone who is trying to collect all released Circus recorded tracks needs to get the single - there is no Album which contains that track. A more practical concern is that the use of different templates for 'single' and 'album' breaks the linkage though the recordings. There is no way to link a 'single' CD into the chronological order of releases. It seems to me that this is a bigger loss than the gain from preserving an artificial distinction between singles and Albums. That wouldn't be a problem in the model where a single is a track off an album, but that model doesn't fit this case. What would make sense to me would be either:

• to use 'Album' when the recording was an independent release (as in this case)

or

• provide some means in the templates to maintain the linkage in the cases where the recording is an independent release.

I'm not going to change it back (unilaterally) but I did want to register my concern. DanTappan (talk)