Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Opera/Archive 26

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Operas category

Despite the policy in here, detailed on the project page, that all operas should be in Category:Operas, I notice that Blond Eckbert has just been removed. And, given who did it, I suspect that this will happen to other operas too. Hardly the way for someone who has complained about her reception here to become any more popular.--Peter cohen 16:30, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Oh, and before someone starts quoting other things as justification, can I just point out that just going ahead and doing things you know full well that other people do not want to happen is a violation of Wikipedia:Consensus.

There's also ignore all rules: "If the rules prevent you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore them." I think the general consensus here is that having Category:Opera has helped us improve our coverage and has certainly done no damage to the encyclopaedia. --Folantin 17:12, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Good point. For this year, my opera work will be based on what recordings and programmes I have. However I can see a future time where I will go through reference books comparing their indices with the entries in Category:Operas to see what isn't covered. If someone is a particular fan of a composer, then they may want to go the route of operas by composer to see what is provided. And someone working on a theme (Polish opera is a current such theme) might be happy to use a language category. But, as a rule, the main list best corresponds to the indices you find in textbooks.--Peter cohen 18:47, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

I have now reverted all dozen or so edits made in clear violation of the consensus of WP:WPO as given on our project page. --Peter cohen 16:54, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

By the way I notice that the discussion in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Opera/Archive22#So what categories are we settling for? on this subject has been changed after it was archived, so that most of us would not notice. I think the choice to do this rather than reply in the main talk topic is prima facie evidence of acting in bad faith --Peter cohen 18:09, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Category:Operas is one of the most useful categories. Ironically, the user who deleted them used them herself first in order to find the articles - operas that were not in Category:Operas were never found and never included in the 'Operas by year' categories.

At some point we'll need to assess the damage caused by the 'Operas by year' on-the-fly, AWB-driven categorization blitz. The work was not done to any system. The user didn't know that the earliest opera dates from the end of the 1590s and created Category:1560s operas, Category:1570s operas, Category:1580s operas. Berg's Lulu, was labelled 1979, the date of a new performing edition. (Has the same been done with any Baroque operas?) Some operas were attributed to multiple years, some not. There are probably many mistakes due to fast, careless editing and lack of knowledge of the subject. (A complete list of 'Operas by year' cats is included in a new project Catlist.)

In the past this user has justified her activity with WP:BOLD however this policy doesn't refer to AWB-driven editing. -- Kleinzach 00:05, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

There are various reasons given for duplication of categories (usually discouraged) at Wikipedia:Categorization and subcategories. I can cite myself as an example of someone who would just pass on if all I saw in Category:Operas was a collection of subcategories by era as I have no idea when a given opera was composed. On the other hand subcategories by era are also a good thing when expertly populated so I can dimly make out a scenario where in due course everyone is fairly happy and all categories are flourishing. Occuli 02:42, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment. It's good to have the view of someone who isn't signed up as a member of the project and who, as far as I know, has no history with the people involved in this argument. And I hadn't read the categorization article before I saw your pointer. It kind of makes the point for us. If I was looking at the prospectus I received recently for next season at English National Opera and wanting to know more about all the works before deciding which tickets to get, then going to Category:Operas and looking up each opera in turn is the natural way to do it. And I think that example is one of the most obvious ways in which the operas part of wiki will be used by the general.--Peter cohen 08:29, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Emboldened by these remarks I have made slight alterations to the subcats so they all show up on page 1 of Category:Operas (it baffled me to see just 1 subcat on page 1 - it would be nicer if the subcats went horizonally on 1 line but that is beyond me). Another point is that the duplication in this case is not in parent/child categories but grand-parent/child or even great-gp, so one needs to do a lot of digging to get to an article. I see on the one hand an excellent set of articles and on the other hand an excellent very versatile well-thought-out set of categories-by-year provided gratis and also swiftly (if at times erroneously) populated. So I see much to admire and an abundance of common ground. Now, onto infoboxes, Iraq etc ... Occuli 09:38, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

If you want to change wikipedia guidelines, follow the proper procedures. Nobody has yet made any persuasive case for why Operas should be an exception to the guideline at Wikipedia:Categorization and subcategories, and a project does not "own" an area of wikipedia. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:12, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

I am citing User benefit rule within Wikipedia:Categorization and subcategories, which I have no wish to change (as a potential user who benefits in this case from duplication). I am nothing to do with this project. (The subcategories are all container categories.) Occuli 10:25, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Nobody? I've been arguing in favor of this sort of arrangement for two years now. I wrote the first version of Wikipedia:Categorization and subcategories because at the time any duplication was frowned upon because there had previously been a technical limitation to the size of categories. With the advent of category table of contents it became possible to have much larger categories. The TOCs opened the door to the possibility of having both the large index category and the subcategories. The main guidelines for categorization say that categories are for browsing. I strongly believe that there should be large topic level index categories as well as the small subcategories we have been creating. It adds a single category to most articles while adding a master index for each topic. You can browse through the entire topic, or examine subsets. With duplication you have a choice. Eventually, many subcategories will probably be removed when category intersection is implemented. Guidelines are written to describe current practice, not to codify it into hard and fast policies. This is exactly the sort of thing Wikiprojects should discuss. -- ☑ SamuelWantman 10:40, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

If you "strongly believe that there should be large topic level index categories", then the place to argue for that change is at Wikipedia talk:Categorization and subcategories; but while guidelines permit the "occasional exception", your advocacy of "large topic level index categories" is a general disagreement with the guidelines rather an argument for treating operas as an exception. I have yet to see any case being made for why operas should be treated differently to (for example) Category:Novels or Category:Christian denominations or Category:Films. Heck, there's even a standard template {{catdiffuse}} to remind editors to follow this guideline, and although Sam supported the efforts to delete it, that debate was closed with a consensus to keep.

Yes, category intersection will make a lot of intersection categories redundant. But it's not coming any time soon, and if/when it does, all the categorisation guidelines will need a complete revision. The current guidelines address the situation now, not what might happen in the future.

BTW, in reply to the point above about why I used Category:Operas as the starting point for the by-year-categorisation, it was for so that I could depopulate it in accordance with the guidelines, leaving behind the articles had not been properly sub-categorised. The same effect could have been achieved by using the sub-categories, and my intention was to run through them as well. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:03, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for this comment. As the original author of the guideline, you will be well aware that the guideline specifically mentions that there are many occassions when the basic rule that BHG is using should be set aside. In other words she is in violation of the guideline she claims to be using. --Peter cohen 11:10, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Indeed. But you still have not answered the question of why operas should be one of the exceptions, when (for example) Category:Novels and Category:Christian denominations and Category:Films are not. What's different here? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:16, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

The suggestion here that the user benefit rule applies might make sense if there was only one set of sub-categories, such as operas-by-year. But that is not the case: there are also Category:Operas by composer, Category:Operas by language and Category:Operas by genre. So even if an opera is not in Category:Operas, there are four different paths to find it. Ironically, those paths are made much less useful by the failure to correctly diffuse Category:Operas, because the diffusion process is a great way of identifying and categorising those operas which are not correctly in the appropriate sub-categories. So the reader is left to wade through the huge list in the parent categories, as well as the sub-categories, because of the inconsistencies. It would be much more useful to readers if members of this project were to work on correctly sub-categorising the articles within the project's scope rather than focusing their efforts on upholding an unwieldy duplicate categorisation system where general articles on operas are buried in a long multi-page list of articles on individual operas. The List of operas is also way out of date, and should be ether expanded or deleted. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:44, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

All those categories are incomplete. You found the two Tippett articles you changed yesterday from the discussion in archive22 where I asked what the agreed policy was having just found that the operas by Tippett category was incompletely populated. So by composer is unreliable. By language is difficult: Mozart composed in German and Italian, Verdi in French and Italian etc. A lay person won't always know where to look. By genre is again not always something a lay person would find obvious.

The example of wanting to look up operas being produced by a particular house will be fairly common. If I visit Milan, I'll want to hear something at La Scala. (I did similar in Prague, Moscow and St Petersburg.). The operas being performed during my visit will fall under several different subcategories. It will be much easier to stay in the main category and look up the operas from there than to navigate the subcategories. This example is something a lot of lay-users of wiki would want to do. --Peter cohen 11:53, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

By the way I agree on list of operas. I think it should be deleted. If the main category is fully populated as most people here think appropriate, then I can't see how a list would add anything useful.--Peter cohen 12:58, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

I the sub-categories are incomplete, then work is needed to complete them. But when I AWB-scanned a batch of sub-categories before starting to diffuse Category:Operas, I found that a significant number of the articles in the sub-categories were not in Category:Operas, so a reader relying on Category:Operas would miss them.

If you want to have a list, then why not just make a list of all opera articles? It could be sortable under several different headings, and would be much more navigable than a category. (I have offered before to make such a list). --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:10, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

This fight seems like such a waste of time and energy. The guidelines on categorization are describing practice, so that people who don't know what the deal is with categorization can jump in and start helping without throwing a wrench in things. The page on exceptions doesn't say that you need to fill out form XP#A in order to get an exception granted, it's just saying it's not generally how things are done. For this group of articles, the majority of the contributors to this group of articles have found this categorization scheme useful. It is not perfected, but very few are. I commend BHG for being bold, and I certainly don't think she should have asked for permission in order to start a different categorization scheme; however, now that it has become clear that removing the parent category at least is considered counter-productive, I think it would be in everyone's best interest if she put a hold on that, at least for now. I do think the year categorizations can be useful, although as with most things, I think the feelings of the main contributor to an article should be respected as to when they should be used. Can we talk about what other sub-categorizations would be useful, and how to get them implemented, instead of whether it's allowed to use a large super-category (which it is)? Please? Mak (talk) 13:20, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Agree with Mak. The category by date system is now sufficiently flexible and we can fix any outstanding problems with individual entries. The general "Opera" cat should stay too since its utility has been proven. It's not as if the six letters "Operas" take up much space on the page and opera articles are hardly "overcategorised", so I don't see the problem with keeping it. We've had several debates here over which categories are useful and we now have a pretty good collection which enables us to sort operas by composer, language, genre and date. --Folantin 13:35, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

The other useful categorisations will require some lateral thinking. For example, by year is not an obvious way for many people to want to look up operas, but those of us who remember the Cyclopaedia of Dates and Events (or whatever it was called) might think it would be nice to know what else was happenning in a year that some event happened and feel that operas are important enough to appear in a by-year classification. Hence the value of BHG's work in this area. --Peter cohen 13:37, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Can a list be automatically constructed of opera articles and kept automatically up to date? And would it be able to cope wiht the appearnce of new cat[[Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Log/2005_June_13#Category:Operas_by_titleegories in the opera by composer or operas by language list. At least if someone thinks of putting any categories on an opera article it will appear in the category tree somewhere. A manually-updated list would always have a time-lag and be out of date. --Peter cohen 13:37, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

I too agree with Mak (as a mere reader, browsing on a whim, following random paths). Looks pretty good to me - keep the list (it has more info than the category list, if it were sortable that would be better still), keep the top level entries in Category:Operas, keep those of the subcategories which are useful (which is nearly all of them). -- roundhouse 13:48, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Given the consensus remains that all operas should be in the operas category and that, as BHG pointed out, not all operas in the subcategories are in the main categories, we need to populate the main category fully. There are 186 operas by composer categories. I've just sorted out those by Adam, but we either need to think about using a bot or split up the alphabet to sort the other 185. --Peter cohen 14:16, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

I think that there is a mistaken assumption in the arguments for a catchall category: that it will be complete. Short of watchlisting every single article on an opera, and checking each change, there is no way to tell whether an article has been removed from a category (related changes can help track additions, but not removals). So as editors used to following the normal practice (per WP:SUBCAT) of not placing an article in both a cat and its subcats encounter opera articles, they are likely to be removed from Category:Operas and depart undetected. A list, on the other hand, can be monitored much more easily, and it's a relatively simple job to revert any removals; harder to build, but easier to maintain and much easier to use. However, I'll leave this for now, since there seems to be such enthusiasm for high-server-load overcategorisation; but I think it's an issue which will return.

It's nice, though, to see outside support for categorisation-by-year. When I started doing that, I was denounced in very strong terms as if only someone who had spent their lives immersed in operas could categorise them by date, and that in any case operas were not amenable to categorisation by date, and further up in this discussion we have Kleinzach back in welcoming mode denouncing me again for having multiply-categorised a few ambiguously-dated operas and made a few mistakes in several hundred edits. Wouldn't it have been more helpful to simply offer to help in any ambiguous cases and to help correct any mistakes? (I skipped most of the ambiguous ones anyway).

Anyway, it looks like a place from where we can all move on: I'll leave the Category:Operas there as I add more by-year tags, and I'll try stay out of this project page, which remains the only project I have encountered where it seems to be acceptable to try to drive out newcomers. Everybody happy? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:59, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Kleinzach . . . denouncing me again for having multiply-categorised a few ambiguously-dated operas and made a few mistakes in several hundred edits. Wouldn't it have been more helpful to simply offer to help in any ambiguous cases and to help correct any mistakes? (I skipped most of the ambiguous ones anyway) BrownHairedGirl. For the record, editors did try to correct the mistakes. This happened on Les Boréades see [1]. After the resulting edit war the page had to be protected - the only time, to my knowledge, that an opera page has had to be protected for a reason other than common vandalism. -- Kleinzach 01:09, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Kleinzach, you should re-read the discussion on that issue before casting aspersions. The problem was that Folantin contested the date categorisation, but didn't explain why, and sneeringly refused to discuss alternatives, ignoring my requests for an explanation of the objections or my suggestions of alternatives. Please don't blame me for the fact than another editor didn't bother to explain why he had a problem with a categorisation, and preferred edit-warring and insults. -BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:14, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

BrownHairedGirl has just done another batch of AWB edits. I don't know how many articles are affected - more than 20 (though the number could be much higher). According to the edit summaries, all of them are "tagging unreferenced articles", though most of the ones I've seen don't seem to include any tags at all. -- Kleinzach 07:15, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Kleinzach, please do read the edit summaries and quote them accurately before complaining: see the contribs list, where the edit summary set for that AWB run was "categorisation under Category:Operas by year; also tagging unreferenced articles using AWB"'. I count 96 of them, and I think that probably 20 or 30 were {{unreferenced}} or needed {{moresources}}. If you object to unreferenced articles being tagged as such, take it to WP:ANI. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:14, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

My account of events would be somewhat different from the one BHG gives in this discussion thread, but no matter. Let's do what Mak said: stop fighting and get back to doing something a bit more constructive. Cheers. --Folantin 10:31, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

There's no need for anyone to reply on your account; the discussion is in the archives at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Opera/Archive20. When I asked "Nonetheless, in that case, the year 1770 is when the opera was first performed, so why do you say question whether it is of any encyclopaedic use?", you replied "The way you are using it really is a straitjacket, if you can't see how describing Les Boréades outright as a "1770 opera" distorts and simplifies the complexity of its history. Are you going to categorise Nélée et Myrthis as a 1974 opera? I've really had enough of discussing irrelevant, peripheral trivia like categories and infoboxes over the past month. Let's get back to some actual editing", and then proceeded to get ruder again.

I'm sure that there will many further categorisation issues where discussion will be useful. In that case, I hope that editors will explain why they think that a particular categorisation is problematic rather than sneering at other editors for not mind-reading.

If people don't want to spend their time discussing what they see as "irrelevant, peripheral trivia", they can of course stay out of any such discussions. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:25, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Good, now that's finished. BrownHairedGirl can you please help us re-constitute Category:Operas? I believe there are still a few hundred articles that are missing and it's a huge job doing it by hand. I'm sure that you'll be able to do this rapidly with AWB. Thanking you in advance and wishing you a nice day! -- Kleinzach 05:21, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Soprano

An editor is suddenly making a lot of changes to this article. I disagree with most, if not all of them. Would someone please take a look and revert if you agree? -- Ssilvers 19:18, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

There are lots of problems with this article and other similar ones, as noted on 17 May Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Opera/Archive21#Voice_article_proliferation. Some of the editors are good but they are working in a narrow area and don't have much concept of how an encyclopedia is organized. Unfortunately, as you've noticed, some of them are voice students who believe they have some kind of exemption status when it comes to checking the facts. -- Kleinzach 00:25, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Category order and tagging

Seeing Tosca as an example of the order of opera categories on our project page, I looked at the article today and have found it has acquired two more tags than in the example.

One is the opera by year category. The logic on the project page would suggest to me that, depending on how prolific the composer is, the year category should be first or second in the order. My instinct is that the more sensible order from the user point of view is composer-genre-language-year-operas. This is something we need to think on here.

However, we have another category sitting in front of the rest that is hard to dislodge because it is placed by a cleanup tag. We could solve that problem by removing the item trivia section, but anecdotes look remarkably similar to trivia from here even though I should like to keep some of those. The bouncing soprano is so well known she should be mentioned.

If we look at Cavalleria rusticana, not one but a whole horde of cleanup tags have barged their way to the front of the categorisation. To remove all of them and fix the issues raised looks like rather more work. I've raised a question at Wikipedia talk:Cleanup because I think such tags should go on the talk page. But does anyone else have any suggestions on where this should be discussed? --Peter cohen 19:13, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

I've just had a look at the Cavalleria rusticana article, added references and removed the 'Lacks references' tag. I also added some information on the original cast. I'll 'adopt' this article over the next few days, expanding it and cleaning it up. Re the 'Trivia' tag - it's entirely deserved. Some of the stuff in that section is quite irrelevant and/or marginal, and the rest could be incorporated into a discussion of the Intermezzo itself. Such tags might be better placed on the talk page, but on the other hand, they are not as visible there. The tags on Cavalleria, which you noticed and brought to our attention are probably maximally useful on the article page itself, because they lead much more quickly to clean-ups. The lack of references in that article was quite glaring. Best, Voceditenore 22:47, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

I was just noticing the magical effect of talking about articles as examples. Tosca has lost it's trivia tag too. Maybe I should try it more. Let's see: "My house is need of a cleanup." "This analysis has to be done by the end of the month so I can use it for the poster I'm doing for that conference."

The tags are useful at present for directing work on operas because we don't actively rate opera articles. But please note you only reacted to the tags because I spoke about them. I found that some of the operas I identified as ones I could provide synopses for have had work happen on them after I mentioned them here. I think Cav would have rated probably as a start-class before you worked on it. Once you've sorted the trivia it will be a B. There are probably quite a lot of opera articles around which if brought to our attention we could do similarly. But, at present, we actually need to find them among a mass of other articles either by a random search or by looking at the categories of articles with such-and such a tag.

Once our planned bot run happens, we'll have a list of opera articles and also a list of opera stubs and can thus produce a category of unrated opera articles fairly easilly. Then, if you or I or whoever have ten minutes to spare for some wiki work, we can look at the unrated category, pick two or three articles on operas or singers or whatever who we like and rate them. Gradually we'll gain a stack of Start-rated articles or whatever that people can choose from when they have a slightly longer amount of time spare and raise to B. The raises beyond that will require more extended work, but there's then going to be the opportunity to say "I want Aida to be a featured article" and get two or three people together and work on it systematically together.

Anyway it's nice to see another person signing up to the project. --Peter cohen 23:23, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

"But please note you only reacted to the tags because I spoke about them." Well, I reacted to the tags faster because you spoke about them, but I would have eventually seen them as I'm working on an article about Gemma Bellincioni (the first Santuzza). On the whole, I think they're more effective on the article page itself, even if they don't look very nice.;-) Best, Voceditenore 23:40, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Multiple Opera Project banners

Before we start the bot run, we need to decide what to do about the alternative project banners that are still in use. These can be seen on the User and project boxes page. There is a (fat lady) alternative to the Sydney opera house banner, also two versions for singers, one for castrati, one for librettists, one for Russian opera. Should all of these be removed now to make it easier to introduce a unified system? -- Kleinzach 02:01, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it would probably be best to have one unified project banner. It will make it easier for the bot runner, and to me it makes more sense to have a single "look". Mak (talk) 13:01, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Unify. --Folantin 17:49, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Agreed.--Peter cohen 21:45, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Good. Can I have some help with this? I assume we can't use re-directs, is that right? Should we delete the alternative banners? Should we replace them one by one by hand? -- Kleinzach 23:53, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Just redirect the old ones. It'll work - take a look an one of WPBios that's just a redirect: [2] -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 00:22, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Now all done. Wish all our tech problems could be resolved as easily (e.g. missing categories)! -- Kleinzach 01:20, 8 June 2007 (UTC)