IMSLP Standardization Project

[BKhon]

I'm considering the possibility of having a new community project specifically for standardizing IMSLP. A very rough draft of the proposal can be found here:

http://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:Community_P ... on_Project

The goal is to standardize things like the general information field, instrumentation, work titles, etc.

I think it would be advisable to wait until Davydov's Manual of Style is not under development anymore. This is a project to start once that is finished. A possibilty to keep in the back of everyone's mind.

Thoughts?

[Choralia]

At CPDL we are considering the introduction of Semantic Mediawiki (http://semantic-mediawiki.org) to standardize logical fields throughout the wiki, so that contents can be organized like a consistently structured database. Was this option ever considered here at IMSLP? Searching the forums with "semantic" as a keyword provides no significant results.

Max

[vinteuil]

Not that I know of.

[imslp]

I've actually looked (quite seriously) at Semantic MW a few years ago. My initial impression was very good, but as time passed I gradually realized that SMW's complexity outweighs its utility on IMSLP. It seemed to me that SMW was designed almost exclusively with Wikipedia-like sites in mind; everything that it can accomplish on IMSLP can be done using simpler and faster methods using internal IMSLP functions. Standardization under SMW also seemed to me to be a significant problem. Of course, it could well be that SMW has progressed a lot since I last checked it out.

Depending on what it is used for CPDL could certainly find it useful... just that the structure of IMSLP's code is somewhat incompatible with SMW. I would rather custom-design a database backend for IMSLP.

[Choralia]

Thanks for the info. At CPDL we considered both a custom-made solution similar to IMSLP, and a solution based on a standard extension like SMW. Our conclusion was that, while a custom-made solution may best fit specific CPDL needs, a standard solution would be best for maintainability. However, we only experimented SMW on a test website, no actual implementation has been done yet on the operational websites.

Max