Tokerboy and I are having a conversation about a list of songwriters.
He started with [[List of songwriters/temp]]. I made some comments on the talk page and then started [[List of songwriters/temp2]] with further talk page discussion. I followed the idea we had discussed here of using other people's lists as the basis of a Wikipedia list.
I'm not really wild about either the first idea, list the top 12 in each genre, nor the second idea, use the lists from Songwriter Halls of Fame, because they are so long.
Even if you aren't interested in songwriters, the issue is a recurring one and hard to solve, so maybe you'd like to chime in.
Ortolan88 Tom Parmenter
On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 10:00:35PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
I'm not really wild about either the first idea, list the top 12 in each genre, nor the second idea, use the lists from Songwriter Halls of Fame, because they are so long.
Even if you aren't interested in songwriters, the issue is a recurring one and hard to solve, so maybe you'd like to chime in.
I don't see lists as belonging on the Wikipedia at all. However, I do see them as an important affiliated project, in a way similar to the Wiktionary.
Jonathan
On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 10:56:51PM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
I don't see lists as belonging on the Wikipedia at all. However, I do see them as an important affiliated project, in a way similar to the Wiktionary.
Even when lists aren't of much interest in themselves, they can be useful to help people find articles.
It's not uncommon that there's a name you can't remember, but you'd recognise if you saw it. A list page is much better than a search, then.
-M-
|From: Matthew Woodcraft mattheww+wikipedia@chiark.greenend.org.uk |Content-Disposition: inline |Sender: wikien-l-admin@wikipedia.org |Reply-To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org |Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2003 10:13:09 +0000 | |On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 10:56:51PM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote: |> I don't see lists as belonging on the Wikipedia at all. However, I do |> see them as an important affiliated project, in a way similar to the |> Wiktionary. | |Even when lists aren't of much interest in themselves, they can be |useful to help people find articles. | |It's not uncommon that there's a name you can't remember, but you'd |recognise if you saw it. A list page is much better than a search, |then. | |-M- |
Lists are less useful in a print encyclopedia, but invaluable in an online encyclopedia, particularly if they are not just names, but names annotated with some kind of one-liner identifying the name.
Tom P. O88
Tom Parmenter wrote:
Lists are less useful in a print encyclopedia, but invaluable in an online encyclopedia, particularly if they are not just names, but names annotated with some kind of one-liner identifying the name.
That's about the way I feel. The other thing that would help would be some browse function that would allow us to see a list of articles in a particular part of the alphabet. We do have a special page to see articles by title but that's useless when you need to start from the top of the list and scroll through over 100,000 titles. Even the article [[A]] is currently number 5430 on that list.
Eclecticology
On dim, 2003-02-16 at 15:52, Ray Saintonge wrote:
The other thing that would help would be some browse function that would allow us to see a list of articles in a particular part of the alphabet. We do have a special page to see articles by title but that's useless when you need to start from the top of the list and scroll through over 100,000 titles.
Yeah, it's kinda ugly. How about something like the alphabetical index for the online AHD: http://www.bartleby.com/61/s0.html ?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion Vibber wrote:
On dim, 2003-02-16 at 15:52, Ray Saintonge wrote:
The other thing that would help would be some browse function that would allow us to see a list of articles in a particular part of the alphabet. We do have a special page to see articles by title but that's useless when you need to start from the top of the list and scroll through over 100,000 titles.
Yeah, it's kinda ugly. How about something like the alphabetical index for the online AHD: http://www.bartleby.com/61/s0.html ?
That would be a definite improvement over what we don't have now!
Eclecticology
(Moved from wikien-l to wikipedia-l; discussion of revamped alphabetical page index affects all languages.)
On dim, 2003-02-16 at 17:17, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
How about something like the alphabetical index for the online AHD: http://www.bartleby.com/61/s0.html ?
That would be a definite improvement over what we don't have now!
Okay, very preliminary version (code is in CVS): http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allpages
Note that the test wiki contains nearly all pages starting with 'A', so the index seems a little oddly weighted. ;)
There's probably some wiggle room in the ideal number of links per page and whatnot. It needs to be made prettier, with backlinks to the top level index and forward/back browsing, but the basic functionality is there.
Also we need to get a proper sorting system in (see my recent post on wikitech-l); for instance if I put this on the Esperanto wiki all the accented letters pile up at the end instead of in their proper places: http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciala:Allpages
Other things: currently the list includes redirects. Some redirects should definitely stay -- alternate names that would not appear near each other, for instance. Others (spelling, caps variations) could maybe be dropped, but that's harder to do consistently. Or more simply, we could just italicize redirects or something.
The generation of the top level index is currently pretty inefficient; it makes a separate database query for each chunk of 480 articles, and takes a while to generate on a wiki with 100,000+ articles. Before putting it on the English wiki live, it'll need to have some sort of caching mechanism if it can't be made a lot faster.
Here's a saved copy of the toplevel index for the big English Wikipedia just to give an idea of scale (the links don't work): http://test.wikipedia.org/upload/c/cd/Allpages-demo.html
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Lists are a major part of the Wikipedia. We have lists all over the place. Zoe Jonathan Walther krooger@debian.org wrote:On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 10:00:35PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
I'm not really wild about either the first idea, list the top 12 in each genre, nor the second idea, use the lists from Songwriter Halls of Fame, because they are so long.
Even if you aren't interested in songwriters, the issue is a recurring one and hard to solve, so maybe you'd like to chime in.
I don't see lists as belonging on the Wikipedia at all. However, I do see them as an important affiliated project, in a way similar to the Wiktionary.
Jonathan
On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 10:00:35PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
Tokerboy and I are having a conversation about a list of songwriters.
He started with [[List of songwriters/temp]]. I made some comments on the talk page and then started [[List of songwriters/temp2]] with further talk page discussion. I followed the idea we had discussed here of using other people's lists as the basis of a Wikipedia list.
I'm not really wild about either the first idea, list the top 12 in each genre, nor the second idea, use the lists from Songwriter Halls of Fame, because they are so long.
Even if you aren't interested in songwriters, the issue is a recurring one and hard to solve, so maybe you'd like to chime in.
Maybe I am missing something but the solution seems rather obvious. If someone wants a list of all songwriters then let them make it under the title "list of all songwriters" and sort them alphabetically. If someone wants to make a list sorted by genre then you put that under the title "list of all songwriters by genre". If you want only the most popular 12 you put it under something like "list of 12 most popular songwriter per genre". Et cetera.
-- Jan Hidders
Jan Hidders wrote:
If you want only the most popular 12 you put it under something like "list of 12 most popular songwriter per genre". Et cetera.
That's where the problems lie. There is no unanimity on just who belongs on that top 12 list.
Eclecticlogy
Here's a link to lists of classic science fiction, done pretty well. He uses several lists and by processing information from the lists arrives at a score for each work.
http://classics.jameswallaceharris.com/
Some works appear near the top of all the lists and thus get a high score.
Even a long list is not an endless list.
Fred
Tom Parmenter wrote:
Tokerboy and I are having a conversation about a list of songwriters.
He started with [[List of songwriters/temp]]. I made some comments on the talk page and then started [[List of songwriters/temp2]] with further talk page discussion. I followed the idea we had discussed here of using other people's lists as the basis of a Wikipedia list.
I'm not really wild about either the first idea, list the top 12 in each genre, nor the second idea, use the lists from Songwriter Halls of Fame, because they are so long.
Even if you aren't interested in songwriters, the issue is a recurring one and hard to solve, so maybe you'd like to chime in.
This is often a no win kind of article. This kind of problem came up at [[List of famous Canadians]] with DW involved in his usual techniques for making friends. Eventually people just went away. If you try to keep the lists short somebody will always be upset when you leave off their favorite. If they are open-ended they get awfully long, but can still be useful as a wish-list for future articles.
Some kind of weighted voting feature could be handy here. Voting for a list would be left perpetually open, and running vote totals maintained. Unlike voting on policy proposals, the results will not affect anything else, and that's what makes it philosophically workable.
Eclecticology
What do we think about all these pages about music albums, which give just a track listing and nothing else?
Some recent additions don't even bother to give the artist: eg [[Hell On Earth]]
I'm wondering whether we should delete them. These are database entries, not encyclopedia articles.
[[Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]] - now *that*'s an encyclopedia article!
What do we think about all these pages about music albums, which give just a track listing and nothing else?
Some recent additions don't even bother to give the artist: eg [[Hell On Earth]]
Generally, we should expand, not delete. But if this turns out to be too difficult, put it on Votes for Deletion.
I would have no objections to importing the FreeDB data, which includes artist/album information.
Regards,
Erik
I see nothing wrong with keeping them, though it would be nice if the names of the bands were included. Zoe Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:> What do we think about all these pages about music albums, which give
just a track listing and nothing else?
Some recent additions don't even bother to give the artist: eg [[Hell On Earth]]
Generally, we should expand, not delete. But if this turns out to be too difficult, put it on Votes for Deletion.
I would have no objections to importing the FreeDB data, which includes artist/album information.
Regards,
Erik _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 07:43:00PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
What do we think about all these pages about music albums, which give just a track listing and nothing else?
Some recent additions don't even bother to give the artist: eg [[Hell On Earth]]
Generally, we should expand, not delete. But if this turns out to be too difficult, put it on Votes for Deletion.
I would have no objections to importing the FreeDB data, which includes artist/album information.
We could also link to them, something like [[cddb:misc:8c08f90a Bochum]] could be made a link in the text pointing to http://www.freedb.org/freedb_search_fmt.php?cat=misc&id=8c08f90a
Best regards,
JeLuF