Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Opera/Archive 12

message: I've done a Template:Britten operas which is almost ready to go, except that the Benjamin Britten article has no image in it for me to use, and Mozart doesn't really seem right for the job, somehow.  It seems that there was once an image in the article (Image:Benjamin Britten.jpg) but it was removed because the copyright status was uncertain.  I suppose I could use the Hambling scallop-shell, but that would look a little weird.  There's a (presumably) usable image in the Esperanto Wikipedia but if get it from there to here I don't know what to say about it when I get it.  Could someone with more expertise in these matters than I have advise (or, better, provide a suitable image which is OK on the copyright front). --GuillaumeTell 15:42, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Working on it. I've found one image that I think might be OK copyright-wise, but I need a bit more time to check whether it actually is. Cheers, Moreschi  Request a recording? 10:37, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Britten image 

message: Is it time now to apply for GA or FA for Buondelmonte's Grand Opera? If so, how should we go about it? - Kleinzach 05:34, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Grand Opera]] for [[WP:GA|GA]]? [[WP:FA|FA]]? 

message: I know that the subject of this article isn't quite under the scope of the WikiProject, but it was a pretty important development in opera, so I was wondering if anyone could lend a helping hand to the article, especially in terms of the history of homophony. Being opera enthusiasts, someone must be able to help. -- Cielomobile talk / contribs 02:36, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Checking it out. Moreschi  Request a recording? 16:26, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Help on [[Homophony]] 

message: Someone is recommending that Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön be copied into WikiSource. We've never really liked articles on individual arias. Maybe this is a good solution? What do other people think about this? - Kleinzach 03:57, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I think this is a fine way of getting rid of operatic fancrufty articles on the latest lovely aria people heard that evening. These articles are rarely of encyclopedic value and are rarely encyclopedic: just, well, often the text of the aria and the details of it's position in the opera. That's operacruft: no assertion of importance outside of the opera! Wikisource is probably the best place for most of these articles. Moreschi  Request a recording? 16:42, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Good idea.  It looks as if most, if not all, of articles in :Category:Arias have been similarly tagged, but not the vocal numbers in :Category:Opera excerpts. --GuillaumeTell 18:40, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Right. I've gone ahead and put tags on some of those in :Category:Opera excerpts. - Kleinzach 23:23, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikisource]] for aria text pages? 

message: Just a note to record my appreciation of the major contribution that Viva Verdi made to our articles - many of those on opera houses, companies and festivals were written by him. Due to his efforts these are among the strongest areas of our coverage. He made over 4000 edits and was probably one of our top five or six editors.
I still don't know why he left WP/Opera Project. The problems with citations on the List of important operas were perhaps just technical? He was also having problems with a vandal who repeatedly blanked his pages, prompting him to change his user name (with a hyphen). Whatever happened I regret he is no longer a member of our group. - Kleinzach 09:45, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Tribute to [[User:Viva-Verdi|Viva-Verdi]]

message: Parsifal has been accepted as a 'good article'. Kleinzach 00:17, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Another opera GA! Excellent! Congrats to the people who wrote and developed that if they read this. Moreschi  Request a recording? 13:38, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I wonder if there are any other pages that are already complete enough to nominate? (I realize that Grand opera, mentioned above, doesn't qualify because there are no pictures included.) - Kleinzach 01:11, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Grand opera could do with a few more inline citations, as well as some pics. Moreschi  Request a recording? 16:00, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You obviously understand inline citations better than most of us, so please don't hesitate to tell us when, where and how to do them! -Kleinzach 23:49, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Parsifal]] accepted as [[WP:GA|GA]]

message: Hi, I am in the trial runs of the User:AlexNewArtBot (see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/AlexNewArtBot). The bot reads all the new articles for a day and puts suspected Opera-related articles into User:AlexNewArtBot/OperaSearchResult, the articles are suppose to be manually put into the portal page and/or removed if irrelevant. Or whatever you want to do with them.
The list of rules are in User:AlexNewArtBot/Opera, there is also the log on the User:AlexNewArtBot/OperaLog explaining the rules that sent an article to the search results (the log  is cleared every day, so try to look into the history of the log). Please contact me if you are interested in the fine tuning of the rules
That is all. Any suggestions are welcome. Alex Bakharev 08:06, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This looks potentially useful, but it certainly needs some fine tuning.  At present there's masses of noise, mostly caused by the inclusion of articles which contain the words "soap opera"!  I'll contact Alex and see what he can do about that:  possibly a much more manageable list will result from just the one change. --GuillaumeTell 10:48, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I appreciate the effort but I've had bad experience of such bots. There was a bot for Project:France which went round adding any page containing place names in French, so we ended up with loads of Canadian, Moroccan etc. articles included. This kind of thing can spark off Wiki-dramas. So it would depend entirely on how intelligent this program is. --Folantin 11:06, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Maybe only ten or twenty percent of the items are relevant to us. Interestingly these were all uncategorized which shows the potential value of such a list. - Kleinzach 14:01, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I seem to remember encountering the destruction caused by the France bot somewhere - but this one is different in that it doesn't tag the articles, it just provides a daily listing.  Alex has already taken the soap opera problem on board - see his Talk page - so let's have a look at tomorrow's listing and see if we need to refine the criteria further. --GuillaumeTell 00:29, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[User:AlexNewArtBot]] - New Article Bot 

message: Perhaps we can look ahead to May? From the point of view of coverage Rossini is probably the most important composer needing attention, however we have already done a lot of early 19th century Italian opera. Other possibilities might be Marc-Antoine Charpentier, or Grétry (perhaps combined with Daniel Auber)? Maybe there are other candidates? - Kleinzach 23:44, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, Offenbach wrote 97, but we are only covering 18 of them (so far), likewise The opera corpus has 10 works for Grétry (all red links) and Auber has seven (four red and three blue). But I take your point about the other opéras comique composers. What should we call the collection, so that it is clear and will (hopefully!) serve to attract other contributors? And what do the others think? - Kleinzach 11:04, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: How about "Important French opéras comiques 1750-1850", for instance? If the Offenbach wasn't absolutely comprehensive then maybe I needn't have worried about having Grétry and Auber as composers of the month, but it would be nice to throw in a few of the major o.c.s by other composers as well. --Folantin 11:14, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds an interesting project, but maybe the title would need to have the word 'composers' included. . . . What do the others think of this idea? For or against? - Kleinzach 12:31, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not against, but there are rather a lot of opéras comiques.  The :Category:Opéra comiques (sic) contains works by Adam, Auber, Bizet, Chabrier, Cherubini, Donizetti, Gluck, Massé, Massenet and Offenbach, and, as well as Grétry, other composers in the genre who aren't represented there include Boieldieu, Méhul, Philidor ....  As to Kleinzach's point, could we retitle May's CotM as Genre of the Month, perhaps? --GuillaumeTell 16:45, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

text: On consideration, maybe it's just simpler if we have Grétry and Auber as composers of the month. --Folantin 17:00, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I second Grétry and Auber (and I am happy to help with odd Philidor, Monsigny', Boieldieu and Hérold informally as necessary). - Kleinzach 22:13, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'll make it my task for April to sort out some of those stray opéras comiques. --Folantin 08:40, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No problem with Grétry and Auber. Moreschi  Request a recording? 09:47, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Excellent. That's decided then. I will add them above. - Kleinzach 10:57, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Composer of the month for May

message: One of the good things about editing opera articles is that images uploads are easy, mostly because copyright isn't a great problem: anything pre-1920s is public domain, and hence fair game, and all two-dimensional reproductions of public domain art are themselves public domain. The practical upshot of which is that it's quite easy to lift operatic images of a certain age off the web and upload them to Commons: the point of uploading them to Commons rather than here is that once at Commons they can be easily used not only here, but across all Wikimedia projects. So, I thought that a few people might like to create accounts at Commons, as well as here, for image uploads. Cheers, Moreschi  Request a recording? 10:49, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Very good idea. The problem is that I (personally) have difficulty switching from text-mode to image-mode. Do other people have the same problem? i wonder if we might adopt a team (i.e. division of labour) approach to compiling articles? Maybe someone would like to specialize in picture research? (Perhaps we could add a picture research team to the main page?)  - Kleinzach 01:29, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Commons:Main Page|Wikimedia Commons]] 

message: I have already done some initial work on the individual opera title articles. 
Maybe it's worth explaining what I have and haven't covered. I've started articles where necessary, extracting all the basic information from the Grove articles by Andrew Lamb. (There wasn't a lot there). I've also made 'wikitables' of the roles, including when possible the role creators, usually with information from the French pages. What we need now are synopses, recordings info and illustrations. 
Incidentally, the Second Empire social/historical background to Offenbach is fascinating. Unfortunately we have few articles on singers of the period and also the theatres. These exist in the French pages. I wonder if we can interest some French translators in our project? - Kleinzach 01:34, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I could give it a go. The problem with many of the articles in foreign Wikipedias is that they are rarely sourced properly. --Folantin 08:52, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: We can be selective in the information we use - and also use Grove/Viking etc. to doublecheck basic facts. (I am always amazed at how new articles grow once you start them off.) - Kleinzach 09:35, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Here are the main entries I had in mind: theatres: fr:Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, fr:Théâtre des Variétés, fr:Théâtre de la Gaîté, and singers: fr:Zulma Bouffar, fr:José Dupuis, Juliette Simon-Girard. - Kleinzach 01:15, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

text: Thank you but it's important to check and edit the text befotre it goes public. At the moment the synopsis and the roles list don't match and the list of musical numbers is wierdly capitalized (e.g. "Ce Petit Est Un Vrai Luron"). Can we use established, authoritative sources to avoid these problems? It would be helpful not to approach the operettas through adaptations and derivative sources. Cheers. - Kleinzach 01:18, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: This month's composer: [[Jacques Offenbach]]

message: This project is inactive. It only ever had one member. Nevertheless it exists in the WP structure as an entity alongside and equal to opera. I wonder if we should merge it into the Opera Project ? If so, how exactly do we merge one project into another? - Kleinzach 23:53, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Incidentally, I have also put :Category:Operetta librettists up for deletion. Operetta performers was deleted some time ago. - Kleinzach 06:16, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If no one objects I'll merge this myself. You just leave a redirect in place and cut-and-paste the relevant content on that page over to here. Perhaps we should create a subpage of the Project page for operetta? Cheers, Moreschi  Request a recording? 17:07, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Merge/redirect would be good, thanks. IMO we don't have enough material for a sub-page. Perhaps we just need to note the remaining populated operetta categories (:Category: Operetta composers and :Category: Operettas) on our project page? I have already depopulated the (relatively few) operetta-stubs. - Kleinzach 13:48, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

text: P.S. The two cats (above) are now listed on our project page. Kleinzach 01:27, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Operetta]]

message: Someone has pointed out that Template:Mozart Operas uses a mix of English and original languages.  Should it be made to look more consistent?  Feel free to comment via the above link. --GuillaumeTell 17:48, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Template talk:Mozart Operas]]