Feature Request: One or the other

[pml]

@ Kenny,

Yes, it’s often the case that people have more than one string to their bow; I suppose there will be cases where the decision to regard a person as primarily an editor or performer rather than an arranger or composer may be quite arbitrary. For a person like Robbins Landon, the primary role of editor fits; however the copyright blurb at the top of the page refers to him as a composer. This is the sort of thing that would or should be changed on the FTE:editor page… unless I misunderstand Edward’s most recent post, where it seems we could simply replace the word “composer” with {{int:cattype}} to do this. (I’m probably being overly optimistic, or thick.)

There were obviously a lot of red links before today; perhaps we can quickly do a lot of {{subst:Nw}} type maneuvers to fill a lot of these out rapidly?

EDITED TO ADD: A while ago I created a template, Nw, that completely failed to work as intended, so I’ve re-purposed it to do this. It’s just a quick and dirty alternative to using the Add Composer page. To use it, just load it up with variables and save the page; e.g. for Guido Adler, I simply put in
{{subst:Nw|Adler|Guido|1855|11|1|1941|2|15|Austrian|Early 20th century}}. It assumes there’s a Wikipedia link available so that you can go off and grab a photo if you want.

@ Edward,

In addition to adding colons to avoid the infelicitous grammar caused by the reversed names, I’ve slightly altered the Works Composed message so that it reads
Compositions by: $1

As for your comment that – nationality really should not mention "composer" or "editor" – the fact of the matter is that this would need to be changed on a heap of existing pages, since we’ve normally assumed we should be doing this:

|Nationality=Australian composers

instead of:
|Nationality=Australian
which would allow an intersection against [[Category:Composers]], or [[…:Editors]], or …

Would a bot be capable of going through the composers’ pages to lop off the extra word?

PML

[pml]

OK.

First off, may I say that one extremely positive outcome of Edward’s changes is the aggregation of different types of work on composer’s pages – so, for example, composers such as Brahms and Liszt now have multiple categories beneath their names: compositions, arrangements, and editorial works. This seems to be an incredibly useful feature, especially for someone like Liszt who was an extraordinarily prolific arranger, rather than having to navigate to a separate page to find his arrangements. (ISTR the Liszt fanboys weren’t exactly pleased by his arrangements being moved to the works pages of the original composers – so this constitutes a win!)

Just to get back to the start of the thread, which was a request of “one or the other” – this seems to have implemented both! For the time being the old categories still exist, though they will gradually become redundant.

I want to raise the issue that we will have need to have page types for persons who are primarily not composers or performers; in theory, we could have the following:

Arrangers
Editors
Librettists
Translators

I am leaning towards combining the latter two categories under a more generic heading, Writers (especially since ‘librettist’ is more appropriate to the authors of long, narrative works like oratorios or operas: the “libretto” for a strophic song is usually a poet, not a librettist, and ‘writer’ is a much better term that generically includes poets), and have implemented a matching FTE template, MediaWiki:FTE:writer; for an example of what this looks like, have a look at the pages for the Romantic poet S.T. Coleridge and the early 20th century playwright and novelist George Bernard Shaw (the latter previously having been categorised as a composer, on the grounds of IMSLP hosting his short book “A Perfect Wagnerite”).

EDITED TO ADD: also refer to the pages for the renowned editors Guido Adler or Robbins Landon. This uses another modification of the FTE template, MediaWiki:FTE:editor. In particular, notice the wording of the copyright notice at the head of the page, which differentiates between editorial works that include original creative material (which would be eligible for full copyright protection similar to a composer) and editorial works of a scientific nature (urtext) that may not be eligible for similar copyright protection. (Adler’s and Landon’s pages generate the two different types of copyright headers normally available.)

Category:Editors currently contains 62 editors – mostly composers who have multiple bows to their strings, e.g. Bártok, Berlioz, Brahms, Debussy, Liszt, etc. etc. – and moderns such as Kenny and myself!

Questions:
• What categories will need to be filled?
• Should we remove the links for “add a work by this composer” (obviously I haven’t tweaked the template very far from the defaults!)
• Should these non-composers have a slightly different colour scheme or design to differentiate them from composers?

We should think about the answers to these before rushing to add a huge amount of new pages and/or rushing to use editor/writer FTE templates.

[imslp]

I just wanted to say that we should hold off on any ad lib restructuring of IMSLP for the moment. I am a little uneasy about the proliferation of different FTE templates that is making me somewhat confused.

Rather, I think that before we implement any significant structural change on IMSLP, we should first come up with a coherent master plan laying out exhaustively all the FTE templates, categories, and how they are used. Then we can comment on whether this all makes sense. For example, combining Translators and Librettists into "Writers" may be possible, but is it really worth the additional complexity? It would be much easier for us to first agree with a coherent design, and then implement it.

I've given you the flexible tools required to restructure IMSLP. But you must use them responsibly and with premeditation, or else we'll end up with chaos

[Davydov]

We're dealing with people who sometimes wear lots of different hats (composer, arranger, perfomer, editor, writer, librettist, translator), so this is the issue that needs resolving. Let's remind ourselves of how this came about...

We started out with page templates for composers only. When recordings came along we introduced templates for performers, some of whom were also composers. So the same person could have two pages that largely duplicated each other, but had different functions. Then we had people who were arrangers, but not composers or performers, so they had to settle for sub-categories within the composer template. The same then ensued for editors, librettists and translators. It's now being suggested that we come up with separate templates for arrangers, editors, librettists and translators, but it's not obvious how these might be used for people who wear more than one hat.

Thanks to Feldmahler's changes yesterday, the composer page now displays works composed, arranged, performed, edited, written and translated by the same person. I'd like to propose that we build on this advance, and have just one "Person page", which covers all the hats worn by an individual. I think it makes sense to have a single portal where all the information on a particular person can be found, with links to the works on the site that concern them.

(Incidentally, I have to agree with PML that the term "Writer" would be better than "Librettist", as it could also be used for authors of musical text books, articles, etc.)

Because the composers make up the largest proportion of the people mentioned on IMSLP, the most expedient approach would be to adapt this for use as a general "person" template. The default references to "composer" can be replaced quite easily by tweaking the composer template, so that it wouldn't be necessary to edit each individual composer page (of which there are nearly 5,000).

One problem area on the composer pages is where we have "Nationality=Austrian composers", for example; however, I gather that Feldmahler has a solution up his sleeve for this one So we can keep the nationality field without specifying that someone is a composer, editor or arranger, and instead have "Austrian nationals" or "People from Austria", etc. The category walker will allow people to search for Arrangers from Puerto Rico, Writers from Ukraine, or any manner of combinations if they wish.

The person templates can then be extended to all the non-composers on the site, thus removing the large number of red links. We will need volunteers to add the basic biographical details of birth, death and nationality, but that's really small beer compared with many of the projects we've undertaken over the years.

I think this is the next logical step in IMSLP's evolution, and it would remove a lot of the complications of the current system.

[KGill]

@Pml: I think we should avoid using multiple FTE templates (composer, editor, ...) at all costs. That would quickly cause something of a maintenance headache, for reasons already stated (individuals fitting into more than one 'type'). Because of that, I think that the solution being experimented with by Davydov is the best - the 'person' template is the most generic (and therefore simple and flexible) possibility suggested so far. I'm also extremely impressed, Davydov, that you seem to have come up with a shortcut solution to the problem of the extra 'composers' text on every 'composer' page - by creating templates for each of the current nationality possibilities that would put the page into the new category 'People from Austria' (for example), you have made it possible to fix that particular problem in one edit (which would be to change FTE:composer to put the nationality category as a template instead). The use of FTE:person wouldn't be a problem (to put as the default in Special:AddComposer), because all of the pages that use FTE:composer use the old-style nationality (e.g., 'Austrian composers') and can be dealt with using Davydov's templates; new pages that use FTE:person wouldn't require the shortcut because their nationality field requires the noun form anyway (e.g., 'Austria'). The biggest problem would then become the discrepancy between the two templates with different usages performing the same essential function - but that could be solved by a team of volunteers going through all the 'composer' categories and changing them to the new format (probably very difficult to do with a bot), and FTE:composer could eventually be completely phased out.
(N.B.: At some point, the categories for 'Romantic composers', etc. should probably be changed to 'People in the Romantic Era' or something like that.)

[Davydov]

[Sincere apologies to KGill, whose message above I accidentally overwrote]


@KGill. Thanks, but I hit a technical obstacle to implementing that solution, because it turns out the FTE templates can't incorporate 'normal' templates with variable name However, Feldmahler says he's coming up with a solution of his own that should be available 'soon'.

If we do go with the 'person' template, then we can change the content of the current "FTE:composer" so it's identical to the new "FTE:person", which would remove the need to manually change "FTE:composer" to "FTE:person" on every composer page.

[imslp]

A summary of new features coming up in a few hours (so, not now):

#4. FTE redirects. FTE will automatically follow redirects. Note that you only need to redirect the main FTE page; the Messages page is not relevant.

#5. FTE ~SPLIT~ function. There will be a new {{~split:~}} function which has the following syntax: {{~split:[variable name]<>[split delimiter]<>[join delimiter]<>[start element]<>[# of elements]~}} An example of this is as follows:

Code: Select all

If a variable, say, {{{Nationality}}} contains the text "This is a sentence.", the following invocation:

    {{~split:Nationality<> <>?<>0<>2~}}

will produce:

    This?is

and:

    {{~split:Nationality<> <>(anything)<>0<>1~}}

will produce:

    This

Note that the delimiter can be a space, as is in the above example.  Also note that the system will return the string intact if no delimiters exist.  The detailed functioning of the function given strange inputs are somewhat complex, but are always harmless and somewhat intuitive.


#6. Tests for Multicat invocation type. Because presumed child categories automatically inherit the presumed parent category's text in the event that the presumed child has none (see #3 above), the FTE:person template injects the {{{int:cattype}}} variable that can be tested for what type of invocation the FTE template is in. For example, with a MULTICAT category of $1/Performer, the {{{int:cattype}}} would be Performer. For the parent category, the {{{int:cattype}}} would be DEFAULT.

#7. Tests for whether FTE:person has non-empty child categories. Variables are injected into the FTE:person template to test whether any child categories have items in them. For example, if there is a page in the child category $1/Performer, then the variable {{{int:multicat_Performer}}} will be set. You can test for this by using ifexist, e.g. {{~ifexist&:multicat_Performer<>yes<>no~}} (note that the & is necessary for all {{{int:}}} variables).

[pml]

Hi guys,

I have no objection to a different solution, which was why I limited myself to creating only two of the possible multitude of FTE templates, and populating them with only two individuals each, to restrict the quantity of work that would need to be undone later: in fact, all that need happen is that the terms “editor” and “writer” be changed to “person” – which is what we’re having to do with all of the “composer”s anyway! (We’d already had a slight amount of creep in this direction once performers and recordings had been introduced to site, as mentioned above.)

Although the changes to the nationality categories seem warranted I’m a little ambivalent about the phrasing of the category. “People from X” seemed quite acceptable; “X People” is a step down, especially if the country X finishes with a vowel, e.g. “Austria People”. As for time period I imagine the word “era” is being added to whatever is there so that we have “People from the early 20th century era” – I suppose that can’t be helped given the initial choice of 8 time periods.

As for the copyright messages that are invoked when the person is either non-PD generally, or just non-PD in the US and EU: would it be appropriate to raise the originality/urtext question here? The point being, if you look at a person like Robbins Landon it appears we should have absolutely none of his work on IMSLP – until you notice the fact that none of Robbie’s own creative work is represented, just the “scientific publication” of Haydn urtexts!

Lastly: one would have thought, since we have categories for composers and performers, that at least one of each item under a category, e.g. compositions under the default category, or performances under Category:Surname, First Names/Performer, would be sufficient to have the person added to the appropriate category: but this doesn’t seem to be happening with fte:person. If we change all of the composers over to the fte:person template, they’ll drop out of the composers’ category, as it is at the present?! (Or is it the intention that composers should remain with the fte:composer template and all of the “rest” – arrangers/editors/writers etc. – should use fte:person?)

Regards, PML