Wishlist / Laundry

[pml]

After the latest spate of obsessive/compulsive wishlist editing that was inflicted on us, the wishlists have grown alarmingly – most of them are over twice the size they were 12 months ago, and they would in fact be much further over the 32 KB warning limit for the size of pages if it hadn't been for some judicious pruning, shall we say.

Not only is the volume of requests twice the size, the number of composers requested has also doubled – making for very long table of contents listings on some pages: L-P has 164 headings (plus some subheadings for some obscure romantic Hungarian pianist).

If it only were as easy to cull the lists by simply erasing the last twelve months’ contribution, they could be made manageable again, but by no means all of the additions are necessarily problematical or bad. There is however a whole lot of really obscure stuff being added that I would be quite happy to see relegated to individual composer’s worklists.

The trouble with overly long lists seems to be they are much less likely to be treated seriously as an achievable list of things to get, and less likely to be well maintained – especially deleting items from the list after new stuff has been added to IMSLP for some period of time.

My feeling is the L-P list should be split, and possibly S hived off from Q-R as a single letter list. I proposed this be discussed only a couple of months ago but the topic was left untouched.

While you all rush to come up with solutions that will solve this once and for all, here’s a new stopgap solution courtesy of yours truly:

Introducing:

The {{Laundry}} template, designed to provide a quick justification for the removal of ridiculously long wishlist additions and link it to somewhere useful and relevant – the composer’s discussion page seems a fairly good option, and one I have implemented for most of the crop of composers:

* Bottesini (laundry list courtesy of Starrmark)
* Dittersdorf (Dgljr5121972)
* Donizetti (Starrmark)
* Durante (Dgljr5121972)
* Gottschalk (Jbd)
* Grainger (Thefrenchhornguy)
* Heinichen, J.D. (Dgljr5121972)
* Kellner, J.P. (Dgljr5121972)
* Kerll, J. Kaspar (Dgljr5121972)
* Kirnberger, J. Ph. (Dgljr5121972)
* Knecht, J.H. (Dgljr5121972)
* Krieger, J. (Dgljr5121972)
* Krieger, J.P. (Dgljr5121972)
* Legrenzi (Dgljr5121972)
* Locke (Dgljr5121972)
* Widor, Charles-Marie (Starrmark)

To pick (perhaps unfairly) on just one example, the Widor laundry list was about 5 kilobytes in size – you would only need little over a handful of such composers to go over the suggested 32KB limit. Before this, another contributor had requested one specific Widor work – one which is still not uploaded to IMSLP. The effect of another contributor coming along and “dumping” 50 items onto a wishlist is that the ONE request for a specific piece gets swamped, and is grossly disvalued by being one indistinguishable item amongst a large (and patently unreasonable) request.

Thus, I'm wondering if the wishlist guidelines could do with a bit more of a “what to do” / “what not to do” set of bullet point suggestions, as well as an indication of how the lists will be policed:

DOs:
* DO request a few items. Proportionality: if IMSLP only has five items of your pet composer, then that’s about the right number of items to suggest people look to obtain for you. PRIORITISE YOUR CHOICES!
* DO be specific about what you want. Do you want a full score? Parts? A particular arrangement? A modern(ish) edition or an original manuscript or first edition printing?
* DO remove items from the lists when the piece seems to have been uploaded for some time.

DON’Ts:
* DON’T request every single item that isn’t on IMSLP.
* DON’T request arbitrarily large numbers of items, e.g. “144 Cantatas by Johann Aloysius Knerkenburger”.
* DON’T use the wishlists to hold conversations – unless necessary!

Zero tolerance:
* Any time I see a composer with a request consisting of the words “Complete works”, the reference will be DELETED.
* Requests of the form “All instrumental works” or “All organ pieces” will have the word “All” replaced by “Any”.
* Lists for a composer (especially ones without large collections already on IMSLP) over one screen deep will be thrown into the {{Laundry}} basket (i.e. removed).

How do the above suggestions sound? A bit too fascistic, or too much weak tea drivel?

Cheers PML

PS Stats on the pages:

Now (7 April 2011) versus — roughly 1 year ago:
A–B: 49,224 bytes / 119 composers — 23,262 bytes / 62 composers
C–F: 40,377 bytes / 124 composers — 16,202 bytes / 60 composers
G–K: 43,427 bytes / 139 composers — 20,434 bytes / 59 composers
L–P: 67,774 bytes / 164 composers — 30,816 bytes / 75 composers
Q–S: 60,800 bytes / 117 composers — 34,621 bytes / 65 composers
T–Z: 28,374 bytes / 80 composers — 14,767 bytes / 45 composers

PPS Anyone wishing to identify some more composers in need of the Laundry treatment, feel free to make suggestions...

[daphnis]

Here, here. Nice post, Philip. Let me also chime in and add, if it should please the court, as a subset of the conversations talking point:

* DON'T include personal thoughts about publication history or cute, stream-of-consciousness comments. If a requested piece is mentioned, then it will, if at all possible, be uploaded from a legal, extant edition. We don't need complete composition or publication histories for the selection.

[pml]

I was trying to avoid deliberately implicating anyone with that fine distinction! To be fair, he's tending to put the really stream-of-consciousness stuff in the Edit comment - which I think is fair game.

PML ;-)

[daphnis]

I would call for a bump of these revisions, including the template and wishlist guidelines. I continue to see far too many superfluous comments added that, while interesting, don't really help the aim of the page, which should only be a collection of pieces not present but ELIGIBLE and REQUESTED. In the past, I have simply moved user-requested pieces that were under copyright to a separate section of the same composer lest they be re-added in the future, but there's no need to simply list them all there just because...

[m.kowalski49]

I'd say ol'chap.. I've never heard of such naughtiness.. I really haven't.......

[pml]

I gather there will be little objection if these changes are made, seeing as two similar threads a couple of months apart (and bumped a few times) have not generated much heat!

First up: the Wishlist Guidelines have been amended, incorporating some of the general observations above. The translations need to be updated accordingly.

Second: L–P and Q–S have been split in three. The new divisions are L-M, N-R, and S; the first is the largest grouping, and S the smallest, but the variation in size isn’t that colossal – all three wishlists are larger than T–Z. As of now all of the composers with surnames between N and R have had their pages updated to point to the new page. 127 composers with surnames starting with L, M, and S are currently redirected to the correct page – these are less urgent to update, but anyone wanting to change these – be my guest.

Third: I’ll be adding another space-saving template which will be documented on the main Wishlist page. This is the new {{WLcopy}} template, designed to produce some standard copyright notices that we use ubiquitously on the wishlist pages (several of which are year dependent, and it’s a pain to change them every January).

Cheers, Philip