Composer birth-death years on work pages?

[Jim DeLaHunt]

Hello, IMSLP developers:

I have a simple feature request: on work pages, in the General Information section at the bottom, there is a line Composer. The composer's name is given like "Mascagni, Pietro". It would be nice to have birth-death years in parentheses after. The page I'm looking at has this for the librettist and original-story author, e.g."Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti (1863-1934) and Guido Menasci (1867-1925)", "Giovanni Verga (1840-1922)".

Why is this helpful? It makes it easier to understand the copyright status. Copyright Made Simple has us check "last surviving composer/arranger/editor/librettist". The General Information section could potentially provide all this information.

What prompted me to make this request is the work page for Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana. It has a WorkNonPD-EU template at the top. I suspect this is based on today being not quite the 70th year after Mascangni's death year of 1945 (though that will coincidentally change in just a few days).

Looking at the templates, I see that this might not be easy to accomplish. I don't understand IMSLP's wiki technology very well. But I think I see General Information section at the bottom being assembled by the fte:imslppage template. The librettist birth-death year ranges appear to come from text in the Cavelleria work page's content, entered by hand via a template:

Code: Select all

|Librettist={{LinkLib|Giovanni|Targioni-Tozzetti}} (1863-1934) and {{LinkLib|Guido|Menasci}} (1867-1925)

The composer's name, by contrast, seems to come from some kind of template populated by outside forces, with no easy provision to supply birth-death years:

Code: Select all

{{{int:composer}}}

Be that as it may, I thought it might be worthwhile to put the feature request out there, in case it sparks something.

And, having looked into this, I have even more appreciation for all the work put into building the technical infrastructure of IMSLP. Thank you to everyone who helped!

--
Jim DeLaHunt, Executive Director & Founder • jdlh (at) KeyboardPhilharmonic.org • m +1-604-376-8953
Keyboard Philharmonic Project • http://keyboardphilharmonic.org/ • @KeyPhilh

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[jossuk]

I believe the dates you seek are readily available by clinking the link of any name from the alphabetical listing of composers, or by clicking his/her name at the top of a page for a specific composition by that composer.