IMSLP Forums

It seems we have a lot people putting lists of links together at present. The instrument lists are a prime example, and some of them are among the lengthiest pages in the wiki. On these pages the links are presorted under a composer's name, and the links to the works pages then have the composer's name removed, which in Wiki formatting goes like this:

[[Sonata (Bloggs, Jo)|Sonata]]

which is fine for works with short titles: a work with a long title ends up being nearly twice as long as it needs to be, e.g.:

[[11 Pièces dans le style religieux, et une transcription du Messie de Hændel, Op.72 (Alkan, Charles-Valentin)|11 Pièces dans le style religieux, et une transcription du Messie de Hændel, Op.72]]

This tends to make these pages rather awful to edit, so I've devised a template to help with this, particularly for use on long or complex pages, called {{NoComp}}. The two examples above would be generated by:
{{NoComp|Sonata|Bloggs, Jo}}
{{NoComp|11 Pièces dans le style religieux, et une transcription du Messie de Hændel, Op.72|Alkan, Charles-Valentin}}

Applying this technique to the longest of the instrument list pages (works for organ and harpsichord) reduced the length from 69 kilobytes to 53 KB. I don't believe it should introduce a huge amount of preprocessing at the server end, since only one template is involved and it would remain cached.

I also made a template, {{LinkComp}}, for making a link to a composer's name (usually a category page in the form: surname(s), first name(s)) while displaying the whole name in the more normative order. Thus:

{{LinkComp|Johann Sebastian|Bach}} —» Johann Sebastian Bach

Someone might find these useful...

Regards, PML

They certainly will be useful! Many thanks, Philip, for coming up with those.

One place where the latter template should prove useful is Editors/Composers. We normally list an editor's given names in the normal fashion, and include a link if there is an associated composer page — Brahms is a classic example.

I've also made a variant LinkCompS which only returns the surname as the link, not the full name. Same format as LinkComp, just add the S to specify surname only.

PML :-)

We should use these in three places:
1. Composer composition lists
2. Instrument Lists (Featured, parts, etc.)
3. Misc. (The ones I created, for starters)
Great idea! Thanks!