IMSLP Forums

I recently wrote a proposal to implement a standardized community project page layout. The first draft of which can be found here: http://imslp.org/wiki/Manual_of_Style/C ... y_Projects. It is now posted on the wiki. The purpose of it is to create a standardized look for all new community project pages. What does everyone think? Questions, comments, criticisms?

Not sure, maybe it's a bit too rigid. For example, the "Translation of the Week" project isn't supposed to have a fixed member list at all. Rather, anyone who is around at a given moment is invited to jump right in with the current week's translation. If people wish to contribute on a regular basis that's great, but the whole idea is to harness the contributions of "passers-by" who might be scared off if it looked like a steady commitment was required.

I just edited it that to make it optional. I agree, I think it was too rigid. But I still think we should have something that fairly rigid, that way the community projects have a more uniform look.

Not bad. It seems consistent with what we've done before.

After a few revisions and criticisms, will there be a link to it in the "Contributor Portal"?

Nah; on the main community projects page probably

Ah, that makes more sense.

Gentlemen -- I have no basis for an opinion on Community Project Standardization, but it brings to mind a concern that I meant to raise some time ago. (I joined these forums only last month but have been a member of the site proper for more than two years.) This is the Admins' playground, where they can design whatever features or set whatever standards they like. Sometimes I nevertheless worry that there has been an increasing focus on non-core technicalities.

I respect an attention to detail. Much of the work here has been almost unbelievably good, and helpful to the music community world-wide. It just seems a pity if contributors must spend time and effort complying with needlessly-proliferating technical or bureaucratic requirements. Such work may be fun for the proponents, but is it sufficiently useful or productive for most other users? This is not about Community Project Standardization, which you may conclude is important; I'm just using that as a jumping off point for my more general concern.

Perhaps I lack the terminology to describe what I'm seeing. It feels something like (in another context) software bloat, second-system effect, and creeping featuritis. And perhaps most of you reading this will at least initially feel that my concerns are misplaced. Of course that is why I am raising them.

Thanks for all of your good work!

Olmsted,

While your concern is valid, I can't say I'm in a total agreement. It must be realized that part of the reason our work on IMSLP is so fine, is because of the minor things. If we didn't have standardization, IMSLP would be a complete mess. Imagine if we didn't have the Manual of Style for Score Submissions! Everything would be disorganized and incoherent.

We have several users making wonderful contributions in terms of scores and such. But, there still needs to be a rigid system of organization. Our categorization system isn't even finished! But, I don't think users' attention on IMSLP has been insufficiently focused at all. In fact, I think almost everyone on IMSLP is doing fantastic work (as you said).

To answer your last question "Is this work useful to other users?". I would argue that it is, for the reason that it provides standardized content. I think that makes users feel like IMSLP is more organized. For example, the Community Project Standardization" might (if it's accepted by the general populace) establish a more organized page layout. Likewise with most of the other "non-core technicalities". This is a library, and libraries need to be technical with everything

On a different note:

olmsted wrote:This is not about Community Project Standardization, which you may conclude is important; I'm just using that as a jumping off point for my more general concern.

Careful... refer to rule 8A. It may have been a better idea to post this on another forum.

Actually Olmsted's is a valid point. The draft would require each project to state "why it would be beneficial to the site", and Olmsted was rightly asking the same thing about the standardization itself. There is no question that standardizing tens of thousands of library entries is an absolute necessity. The need to standardize a dozen or so Community Projects may be a little less obvious.

Rules are undoubtedly a necessity. Too many rules and too aggressive enforcement without a clear need on the other hand can be detrimental to the community dynamics. This goes also for "rule 8A": thread hijacking is a bad thing and it should be strongly discouraged. However, a certain amount of topic creep is natural in some circumstances. People are not computers. That's why the forum moderators have the tools to rename and split threads when it seems appropriate.

To conclude my still-related-to-this-topic digression: I hope not to hurt anyone's feelings by saying this, but I believe that Citizendium is a prime example of how excessive bureaucracy can hinder the development of a project. There is a less neutral but well referenced article at a site called RationalWiki which might be worth a read.

True. Also, these projects proliferate at a rate slow enough to make it a very small amount of work for admins to correct the pages.