Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Composers/Archive 11

message: I took the liberty of adding a "New articles" section to your main page, in line with other Wikiprojects that I've seen, so that these articles can be highlighted for others to review.  I've kicked off with Guto Puw: seeing as he is to feature in the 2007 Proms, I thought there should be an article about him.  Bencherlite 10:25, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  New articles section 

message: Sorry to have to call attention to the dead horse yet again, but editors are insisting that the consensus not to use a biographical infobox at Edvard Grieg be reinstantiated at that article's talk page.  Fireplace 18:43, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Edvard Grieg]] infobox 

message: The Chopin Project has been inactive for some time now. I propose that this project merge whatever content from that page relevant into this project, given that it is the most directly similar active project. John Carter 18:20, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed merger 

message: It would be good if someone who knows more about Albéniz than I do could have a look at the article, which seems bizarrely unbalanced to me.  Most of it is devoted to one work of his ("Chants d'Espagne", not Iberia), it is very confusingly arranged, there is no list of works, or even a partial list, and so on. --GuillaumeTell 21:25, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Isaac Albéniz]] 

message: I placed your project tag on this article. Rlevse 13:40, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: [[John Philip Sousa]]

message: People here  may be interested in the AfD on :Grieg's music in popular culture , and a a number of similar ... In popular culture AfDs.  DGG (talk) 06:48, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: In popular culture Afds

message: Okay - so I can see why Compositional style of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky might be its own article - it's really long, so should be separated from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.  But my question is - does the new article get the same cats as the old one?  I mean "Compositional style..." isn't a :Category:Russian composer, right?  Or how does that work? -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 07:24, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Surprised nobody answered, to throw my opinion in (not exactly useful, but perhaps better than nothing :-) ), it should definitely not be added to any composer categories. The people who would find it useful will find it easily through the main article. Lethe 17:18, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tchaikovsky question 

message: Would appreciate any comments and/or suggestions for improvement on whether I've followed guidelines/policy for fair use of composer sound excerpts at this Fair use Review.  Thank you.  ♫ Cricket02 23:26, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Fair use issue for sound excerpts

message: The rejection of the infobox concept has a serious downside to the extended use of Wikipedia knowledge by outside computer-based entities. The microformats project relies mostly on information derived from the standardised markup that infoboxes were designed for. Among the subjective participants of the artistic community, do not people still want to be able to search for things in more extensive ways, however not perfect they may be? Its a shame that a group of people can get together and tamper with the resource that wikipedia could be. The semantic web may be a foreign concept to some, but it is being helped in part by Wikipedia contributing concise pieces of structured information to it. 
Neither of the major argument on the talk page are convincing to me. 1. Infoboxes don't look crappy, if you think they do then style them, or take them out with your Monobook.css, don't impose your artistic tastes on the wider community. 2. That they are technically incorrect, leading to misassertions, which are somehow better described in free flowing text. A scan of major composers (and in other related projects) which are apparently hard to describe concisely are actually extremely minor issues. Not knowing someone's birth date or place should not be reason for destroying every infobox. Likewise, it is not the wikipedia, or consensus way, to lay down and die lest there is something incorrect such as the musical period or genre, they are specific issues, not general ones. If the community outside of wikipedia refers to someone as being in a particular genre, style or period, then it is not the place of wikipedia editors to put their Original Research thoughts in. On the other hand, if it truly if so debatable in a particular situation, then put both in the infobox, and describe the truth in text. No harm done.
Articles aren't precious resources to handle carefully. "If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed for profit by others, do not submit it." Ansell 10:25, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Correctly designed infoboxes are good. Badly-designed ones are bad. Infoboxes are best designed by collaboration between editors on the subject in question, and those who can design infoboxes. The worst results appear when someone who doesn't know a subject area well enough tries to apply an inappropriate infobox design. Carcharoth 10:36, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

text: What is the eternal consequence of a bad infobox, and why aren't people fixing them? It is not very convincing to say that because the infobox was in some way badly designed, that it should be chucked out. And yes, I have read the extensive rants on the issue and havn't found any permanent technical reasons, all the reasons are subjective, and the complainants havn't done anything about it for the past few months since they were doing all the talking. Its all good to say something is bad, but if you dont point out the exact reasons and set about to fix them, then the destruction of the infoboxes is worth nothing because it will continue to bite the current limited set of artistic-biography project(s) as the odd one(s) out Ansell 11:11, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Incidentally, could you explain when the technical advantages of infoboxes will be implemented? I've often wanted to generate a list of the articles using a particular field in an infobox, plus the data, but this obvious application never seems to have been implemented. For example, I'd like to run a query that lists all the articles using the "Employer" parameter of Template:Infobox Person, plus the values entered for that parameter. That would be useful. As for designing composer specific infoboxes, have you seen User:Turangalila/sandbox/Infobox composer? It took me five seconds to find that with a Google search. Did you try looking for that? Carcharoth 11:50, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I did know about that, I also realised while reading the discussion of it, that it had gone nowhere for the past few months. 05:38, 3 June 2007 to be precise. There are websites devoted to parsing pages and providing realistic queries for people. The technical aspects of your question could be designed but I am not sure whether this site would help you at all, but it contains the basic ideas for asking semantic questions of wikipedia. Ansell 09:05, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

text: I'm sharply opposed to User:Ansell's position.  If we need some standardized markup for making content more searchable, then by all means, let's do it--but  there's no need for this markup to be visible on the page.  The crucial point, which has been made repeatedly, is:  prominently displaying facts that were chosen in advance, rather than those that are important to the topic at hand, is a bad form of article organization.  Why is it so hard for people to understand this?  Opus33 15:53, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: My point is that, at least in part, people have actually been using the HTML structure to parse the information, although, the increasing use of proper microformats seems to be superceding that in technique terms. However, why should we force people to mark up the relevant parts of the text when they could do it all in one place in a structure they can use on multiple pages. If you want to make up an invisible infobox then feel free I say, you won't be harming anyone, and it will be an improvement over the current embargo on their existence by page owners. Ansell 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Isn't Wikipedia:Persondata already an invisible form of adding people data? Also, just pointing people to external websites is not helpful. The geocoding is mostly inhouse, so why not the parsing and querying of biographical data? Carcharoth 09:54, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

text: Wikipedia is about getting to better accuracy through development. If a reader expects wikipedia to be a perfect source of knowledge at any one time they are poorly informed. You may be interested in this essay for a broader picture of the issue, as the broader community does not quite share the emphasis that you portray. You are sacrificing The Truth just by stating something you are not completely sure of, whether it is in text for personal interpretation, or in a box which supposedly only has one interpretation. Whichever way it goes, there are real world facts which make up the reason you are writing at all. Ansell 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

text: I've stayed pretty neutral on this argument, but I wonder. Why are composers being singled out? I understand obviously what page we're talking about this, but wouldn't this affect ALL boxes for long dead people? ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ 16:11, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think composers have been singled out because the substantial opposition to the use of infoboxes was quite unusual. Infoboxes are inaccurate elsewhere across the project, but there is little sustained opposition. The concept of microformating is a good one - the problem arises that this is pushing square pegs into round holes. I agree with Opus' point - there is no need why the info cannot be tagged and embedded - it doesn't need to mar the page. Eusebeus 16:31, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Why not just make an invisible info box that contains all the same things but doesn't make the page ugly? Thats only half of the opposition though. Ansell 08:41, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

text: Agreed. I would get rid of almost all bio-boxes if I could. The literacy problems of "outside computer-based entities" aren't our concern; we're supposed to write for humans. If microformats can be accomodated without infoboxes, all well and good. If they can't, then they need further development. --Folantin 16:38, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The literacy problems of computer based entities are actually a major issue to us and humans in general. How do you think Google became as smart as it is? It did it in part through meta-tags and imperfect linguistic analysis. It still has issues, but it does it in part because of efforts by humans to improve the system. On microformats, they are able to be accommodated without infoboxes, but why would you want them. The ugliness is only part of the issue. The search engines that utilise the data won't know if you just wanted to hide the information away because you were ashamed or sick of looking at it. They can be accommodated if people know what templates to put in what places, but the essential format of infoboxes offers another dimension of analysis in order to better categorise the blob of data that wikipedia is. Ansell 08:41, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

text: Sometimes infoboxes are useful, though. Either as a tabular summary (think of the lead section in tabular form), or as a place to stick boring data and taxonomy. See Earth and Hydrogen and Tiger for example. For people, though, it is difficult. Carcharoth 17:06, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

text: Sure, that's why I specified bio-boxes (biographical infoboxes). Individual humans tend not to fit into categories as neatly as chemical elements or animals. Sports stars maybe (so long as they have no other careers). --Folantin 17:18, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Humans may be diverse, but that doesn't disqualify them from classification. By its very nature, Wikipedia is describing real knowledge. If the facts don't exist, they shouldn't be here at all, whether in infoboxes or not. Pushing a bias against "boxing" because it is currently not in philosophical vogue won't help the project. And even if a sports person has another career, why should they not be "boxed" as a sportsperson. Why does the existence of two things destroy the one. Ansell 08:41, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

text: Why would science's want to remove them? The inaccurateness and ugliness that forms the core of the reason they are not liked in artistic circles doesn't translate to science. Science has facts that it asserts as valid based on theory and it is not scared to state them as that. This is very much an artistic squabble, and won't successfully be pushed out to the broader community. Ansell 08:41, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Have you actually checked this out? Which Science projects have embraced infoboxes? Please tell us. Quotation from Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Infoboxes:  "Certain biography articles have opposition camps on infoboxes.  . . .  for instance, scientist articles can have some heated debates on these. So, if you are tagging a scientist, academic, or "classical" composer, musician or singer, first ask on the Talk page."  -- Kleinzach 08:55, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I said science, not scientists. The major issue still stands that people are either reluctant, or fully opposed to any form of ordering with relation to humans because of a personal philosophical position. Yet, they are still willing to write about them in paragraphs? Also, you wrote part of that sentence, so the fact that it exists in the current form doesn't totally justify it. Ansell 09:11, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Please don't make misleading claims: I did not write the part about scientists. I changed composer to composer, musician or singer - a clarification to which nobody objected. I didn't write the part about scientists. -- Kleinzach 10:05, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Elimination of the majority of microformats/semantics a technological backwards step