Wikipedia:WikiProject Percussion/Lists of percussion instruments

A proposed guideline, in early draft form

Guideline

Articles on percussion instruments should not contain exhaustive lists of instruments of any particular type. Rather, these articles should contain a few examples where appropriate rather than a comprehensive list, and two lists will be maintained in the article namespace:

• List of percussion instruments is a single, inclusive list of all percussion instruments.
• List of percussion instruments by type contains many lists that are subsets of the inclusive list.

Articles will link to sections of List of percussion instruments by type, either directly or by way of redirects to sections as appropriate.

Both lists may need to be broken into smaller lists if the article size becomes excessive, but this is to be avoided with the inclusive list of possible.

Rationale

Lists imbedded in articles:

• Pose a maintenance problem as articles on new instruments are added.
• Bloat the article.
• Provide no benefit over the above methodology.

List of percussion instruments presently consists of a single, sortable table, providing a quick alphabetical index which can be broken into more specific lists by sorting on either of two columns, Common usage (pitched/unpitched/both) and Classification (high-order Hornbostel–Sachs classification). There is room for perhaps two more such columns, perhaps relating to usage (orchestral/popular/world music/multiple?) and/or ethnic origins (Latin American/African/Middle Eastern/Asian - this could be blank for many instruments). The Classification column might go to the second or third level and become numeric perhaps - no more than three or the sorting becomes less useful.