Talk:Boys Like Girls

message: they are radio friendly, pop-ish rock band with indipendent and unique music style with alternative feel ---> 
pop-rock,indie,alternative rock
they have nothing to do with pop-punk or emocore, no matter they have been influenced by some emo/pop-rock bands like jimmy eat world.
Xr 1 20:07, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: They might sound a bit pop punky but they have yet to call themselves that. Caden S (talk) 18:03, 28 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure about your "dead" statement but they do classify themselves as part of the emo genre. Caden S (talk) 04:01, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Genre

message: Is there a reason we have at least 14 references in this article and they don't lead anywhere? Looking back at the history it appears they used to link to something but someone has deleted them all. Perhaps someone could fix that? --BHC 08:27, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: References

message: They are not emo, if you go to the article on emo it is a type of hardcore punk and they are pop-punk. hardcore  punk is heavy fast and has your average punk lyrics. So emo is the same thing just emo lyrics. They sing about falling in love not wishing their wrists were bleeding. I will not lie they have emo lyrics in one song but the style of how they play it is not emo.... the only true emo band is my chemical romance and they deny the whole thing.
p.s. I like boys like girls, im just saying there not emo  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.248.244.189 (talk) 01:41, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The article does not say that the band is emo. The infobox does not show this either. Caden S (talk) 16:52, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  They are not emo 

message: We need to gauge consensus on which image will be used in the lead. The image that is not used in  the lead, can be placed elsewhere in the article. The options are this (Image A) or this (Image B). Let's keep this civil folks. — R2 11:20, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: It makes more sense to show the entire band as the main image, don'cha think? Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? 16:12, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with Bugs. Let's remember this article is about the rock group Boys Like Girls. It's not an article on Martin Johnson who's the singer. I believe Image A is the best choice for the main page. It's better quality, has better lighting and has two members of the band in it. Image B, I'm sorry to say is awful. Caden S (talk) 21:17, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

text: Anybody have one with the whole band???? =]  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.255.245.1 (talk) 21:57, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Which image to use 

message: Hi. Someone improperly closed a table, making it difficult to read the studio albums. I fixed the issue. I also accidentally signed the page. That error has been corrected.
Silvarus (talk) 23:37, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Improperly Formatted Table 

message: I've made some major edits to the article structure, mostly based on the Switchfoot article (which is a good article).
Hope it's okay with everyone.
Andrew Duffell (talk) 21:54, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The introduction is better. I also like all of the edits you've made so far. You did a really good clean up job overall. It looks good. The article seems to flow better now. Caden cool 12:34, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clean Up June 2009 

message: The band is going to perform at "The View" show on the 22Th of December.
This information must be added. Zizo1990 (talk) 22:18, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Info  

message: It says in the introduction " Recently, on November 17th, 2011 at 5:17 AM, Martin Johnson tweeted "...#boyslikegirlsisdone", revealing that the band the group announced an indefinite hiatus asserting that it has not broken up, rather that the members are taking a rest and engaging in various side projects." 
but in the section "2011-Present: Departure of band's bassist & upcoming third studio album" it has this statement ""In November 2011, Martin tweeted he will post a video update the following day, which was later accompanied by a second tweet "...#boyslikegirlsisback". It was later revealed that the band would be commencing the preparation of the upcoming third studio album in the frontman's place back at Los Angeles.
On November 19, 2011, another video update from the official Boys Like Girls YouTube channel was uploaded, confirming that Boys Like Girls is currently recording a new album""
So these two statements are contradictory because they cannot announce their hiatus and and retrn to work for a studio album within days of each other.  
Faceestrella (talk) 12:46, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  About the Introduction 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I stand corrected. This is not a :WP:LANGVAR issue at all. See American English band articles (:Talking Heads, :E Street Band, :10,000 Maniacs) and British English band articles (:The Beatles, :The Rolling Stones, :Queen (band)) and others ( :U2, :Midnight Oil, :Crowded House, :The Band). So why are you insisting that bands of people, this article does fall under :WP:BLP after all, should have impersonal pronouns (it, etc.) rather than treated as a collection of people (they, etc.): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Boys_Like_Girls&type=revision&diff=719612771&oldid=719603547? A self revert is in order and discussion should ensue, or does this discussion have to be brought to a wider audience? 208.81.212.224 (talk) 20:06, 10 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:  Ah. I see. I'll take it to a larger community since all of the examples are one singular unit and they use plural pronouns. Sorry you disagree. 208.81.212.224 (talk) 00:00, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:  The two examples that I provided were British bands, and per Wikipedia guidelines, using plural pronouns is acceptable as that is what is common in British dialect. With American dialect, singular units take on singular pronouns- look at the articles for musical groups such as Green Day, Fall Out Boy, or Relient K if you would like to see article's written about American bands that refer to each group as one unit. ~Peter Dzubay (talk) 01:46, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: The ENGVAR issue is that British English uses plural verbs with singular subjects when those subjects are understood to represent a plural entity. American English matches the number of the verb to the number of the subject. Which means that, even in American English, if the band name is plural, the verb is also plural. The Stray Cats, who were American, were a band, but the Brian Setzer Orchestra is a band. The Doobie Brothers, also American, are a band, but the Allman Brothers Band is one. The difficulty with Boys Like Girls is that it sort of looks like a plural noun. It's not, it's a sentence used as a brand name. Each member of the Stray Cats could be considered a Stray Cat, but each member of Boys Like Girls is not a Boys Like Girl. So "Boys Like Girls" shouuld be treated as a singular subject and take a singular verb. --Nicknack009 (talk) 07:48, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:   But he is not changing verbs to be in agreement with the singular or plural, he is changing pronouns. So "they" is changed to "that it", "they were" to "the group was", "The group later changed their name" to "The group later changed its name" (emphasis mine). Bands are people. Bands are not objects. It doesn't matter whether they are British, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealanders, Iranian, North Korean or Afghani. So despite what Peter Dzubay, it is about the use of impersonal pronouns because that is the change that he, not it, made. There is no change of verb tense at all. 208.81.212.224 (talk) 17:09, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:  Both "they" and "their" are plural pronouns, and in my edit, there were times that I referred to the band members and referred to them as "them" or "they". When talking about the band as a singular unit, however, it is only one object in American dialect. Using "they" and "their" when referring the group is the equivalent of saying "the band are", which is only accepted in in British dialect. ~Peter Dzubay (talk) 18:33, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: This is how American English treats collective names. For example, here's an article from the Wall Street Journal about Leicester City Football Club. It starts "When the English soccer season kicked off last fall, Leicester City was considered so hopeless that bookmakers put its odds of a title at 1 in 5,000." (emphasis added). Football teams, like bands, are not objects, and in British English are usually treated as plural, so a British newspaper would say "their odds of a title". But Americans don't. They use a singular verb, and the pronoun "it" (when they refer to the team as "the Foxes" they use a plural verb and "they"). I'm a speaker of British English and I find it awkward, but the American usage is well-known and not controversial in the slightest, so our anonymous friend really should leave it alone. --Nicknack009 (talk) 20:16, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:  But football team articles are not considered biographies of living people, while band articles are. Walter Görlitz (talk) 05:24, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:  Not true.  WP:BLP entirely applies to a team article with regard living members. BLP does not apply at all the band the members of which are all dead, e.g. The Andrews Sisters of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" fame.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  09:57, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

text: No one has ever presented any convincing evidence that this is a WP:ENGVAR matter.  For at least five years, I've seem people claim it is and then fail to prove it. At most, there's a  favoritism for one style in one dialect vs. the other. It absolutely is not some kind of "rule" in any dialect, nor in any particular genre or register of English (the closest is probably a vague and hardly universal quasi-convention to treat teams in the plural in sports journalism). This holds for bands, sports teams, research teams, etc.  What  discernible is that collectives of this sort are referred to with plural pronouns when "the human element" is under discussion, and with singular when treated as a business or legal entity or property, or as a social phenomenon.  If a collective entity is strictly a business, a government agency/ministry/department, or a nonprofit organization (NGO), it is more apt to be treated as singular.  The form of the name also has some effect on the treatment.  Something that sounds plural (Morris Day and the Time, the Kingsmen, the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Weathermen) is more apt to be treated plural, by influence from broadcast journalism where it will be spoken aloud. By the same token, something with a singular-sounding name (Black Sabbath, The Colourist, the Miami Heat, the Ministry of Defence) is more likely to draw singular treatment.  Don't make it more complicated than it has to be. There is no International Agency of English-language Policing, and no iron-clad rule for things like this.  Write it the way that seems most natural, not the way that whatever pundit you like most demands that you write it. WP has no need for external punditry, and all off-WP style guides conflict with each other on virtually everything. If WP's own Manual of Style leaves a common matter open, it's almost always because we're leaving it intentionally up to editorial discretion on an article-by-article basis, because it doesn't matter, and conflict about it isn't frequent enough to demand that we have an arbitrary rule to stop the fighting.  So stop fighting, and don't make us make an arbitrary rule, which will necessarily leave a large number of people unsatisfied. If a construction is clear and adequate, don't change it, other than for consistency with the rest of the article.PS: The case of "Boys Like Girls" is not a simple one. The words suggest plural, but the phrase as a whole is a singular statement. Except it's also a two-way pun, a triple entendre, suggesting both "boys who are similar to girls" (a plural construction), as well as the notion "As with girls, thus with boys" (another singular unit).   — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  09:57, 17 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  LANGVAR edit war 

message: Evidence it's not a WP:ENGVAR matter: Here's Google News searches of first American-biased sources, followed by British-biased results for the same search terms (except for the American sports material, swapping in a British team instead), generally favoring the treatment of teams and bands as plural, though at least  historically, bands with singular names have often been written about in the singular, and usage also varies by context. We also know that corporations and the like are usually given in the singular. (Note: These searches cannot force returns  from US or UK publishers, just lean the results one way versus the other. One can do a general Google search limited to US vs. UK sites, to an extent, but it will return mostly unreliable sources like blogs and forums).  
Sports teams, in current news sources: Try Gnews US search for "San Francisco Giants is" -wikipedia -wiki ; virtually every hit is for something else, like "<player name> of the San Francisco Giants is ...", "<player name>'s former team, the San Francisco Giants, is ...", etc., not something like "The San Francisco Giants is playing against ...".  Now use "are" instead of "is" ; almost all hits are for the constructions expected: "The San Francisco giants are struggling ...", "If the San Francisco Giants are to continue their ...".  Try the same sort of search for Manchester United, and constrain the results to the UK version of Google News: "is" again loses badly to "are" (worse than it looks because of the false-positive skew).  You can do the same kind of search on various other team names with the same result.
Band names, in current news sources: If you do searches like this on band names, you find that those with singular-sounding names get singular treatment fairly often (with "is")  (UK: ),  (UK: ), etc. (but with lots of false positives as in the Giants example). However,  despite the form of such names  (UK: ),  {UK, about even until seeing way more false positive for "is" than for "are": ), etc.  Those with plural-looking names get plural treatment most frequently. This is best tested with bands that have long histories, cannot be confused with something other than the band (thus, The Cure or Foreigner won't do), and which are presently charting, currently touring, or have announced upcoming tours, and are actual bands, not things like "Kenny McChesney" or "Calvin Harris & Rihanna". Google News won't produce many modern hits for defunct bands, and I'm not sure style is going to be reliably determinable for brand-new "one-hit wonders" who also don't have much RS coverage anyway, plus many have weird character substitutions and other quirks in their names, which interfere with search-result accuracy (even using "Panic! at the Disco" is pretty iffy).
In a few cases, the numbers seem fairly close between "is"  (UK: ) and "are"  (UK: ), until you see just how many of the "is" hits are false positives ("'An Evening with Huey Lewis and the News' is included with ...", "The opening scene, set to 'Power of Love' by Huey Lewis and the News, is ...", etc.), and how few of the "are" hits are mistakes. In other cases, like Pet Shop Boys, the "is" usage  is utterly dwarfed by the "are" usage .
Any name ending explicitly in "Band" or "Group" or the like automatically leans toward singular usage strongly , because of the type of name (it is self-referentially reinforcing that it is a singular unit). Here, the "are" cases  are the ones with lots of false positives, e.g. "fans of the Dave Matthews Band are ...".  The same can also happen, to a lesser extent, with names that sound like a single person's name or nickname, as in Steely Dan ("is" leads against "are"). Plural-looking names without a leading "The" (e.g. Guns N' Roses) may seem to break even ("is" vs. "are", until you remember that most false positives are in the "is" results. The results are not entirely consistently in favor of plural treatment, especially if the band name is a phrase that doesn't intrinsically sound like a band, e.g. 3 Doors Down ("is" beats out "are", even accounting for the false-positive skew.
Band names, in historical N-gram corpora: N-grams can, tentatively, be useful for historical comparison, but the data has too many obvious gaps in it, producing zero returns for phrases that we  for a fact (e.g. from matching Google News searches) are frequently used by reliable sources; among those producing no returns at all from Ngrams are "Led Zeppelin was" (but plenty for "were" [which dominates], "is", and "are"), "Fleetwood Mac are" (but plenty for "was" [which dominates], "is" and "were"), and many others, that readily turn up in the GNews searches. On the up-side, the publishers in this case  be constrained to US vs. UK. And while, as noted above, there are always false positives, these are much fewer in Ngram searches because it only returns hits for contiguous phrases unbroken by punctuation.  At any rate, to the extent the data is usable, is suggests that over the course of the last few generations, the predominant pattern across English usage has been to lean toward treating plural band names with plural grammatical constructions and vice versa, but with plenty of overlap. 
* The Beatles: dominated by "were" and "are" (plural) –  total, US, UK (same result with a lower-case "the" – total, US, UK)
* The Rolling Stones: dominated by "were" and "are" (plural) – total, US, UK (same with lower-case "the" – total, US, UK)
* Led Zeppelin: split between by "was" and "were" (past tense, with singular "was" in the lead in that "section") over "is" and "are" (present, with singular "is" in the lead there) – total, US, UK.
* Jefferson Airplane: dominated by "was" and secondarily by "is", with the same pattern as Led Zeppelin – total, US. Except in British sources, both "was" and "were" are found, but not "is" or "are" – . While this is evidence of a data gap, what data we get is consistent with the US data (singular beats plural).
This pattern is nowhere near absolute, however:
* Pink Floyd: conflicting results – US: "was" and "is" (singular) lead against both "were" and "are", with the past tense being more common in each group . However, in the British results, "were" leads "was" despite the singular form of the band name (and past leads present), yet this reverses to "is" beating "are" in present tense . In all sources total, the leading-to-losing order is "was", "were", "is", and "are" , which matches neither the US nor the UK pattern, but is a mish-mash of both, commingled with Australian, Canadian, etc., results, which we cannot view separately.
Conclusions:   Usage leans toward plural generally, but this trend is much stronger for band names that sound plural, and may sometimes even be reversed for singular-sounding names, though this result is not at all consistent, and is more apparent in half-century-wide Google Books N-gram searches (which have very weak and gappy corpora for this sort of material, and thus verge on unreliable) than in modern news searches (also imperfect, due to a higher false-positive rate from ignoring punctuation, but this is easy to detect just by looking). The discrepancy demonstrates that the singular practice for singular-ish names is declining (probably because of arguments within publishers that mirror the recurrent one within Wikipedia). ; usage is not consistently different between US and UK treatment, and there is only very weak and circumstantial evidence of any alleged preference for always-singular treatment in American sources, and much evidence that directly contradicts this idea; to the extent there may be any slight trend in this direction, it is weak and growing weaker by the year, and certainly falls far short of ENGVAR's "strong national tie".
Recommendation: If MoS were to address this directly, it should say essentially this, in shorter wording:  Unless someone can strongly refute what I've researched and reasoned so far, without cherry-picking, I will probably propose an amendment of this sort to MOS:BIO.  People really need to stop fighting about this. Especially stop waving bogus nationalistic flags above the issue; that vitality-sucking nonsense needs a stake though its heart right now. This is perennial, lame drama, and it's just tiresome.  Noise like this is precisely why so many Wikipedians get sick of, even angry about, style disputes and the time and productivity they waste.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  14:08, 17 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some news-results sourcing, and conclusions and recommendations based on it 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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