Hi, It is the happy circumstance that: a) Articles about pieces of classical music are much better with an excerpt of the music presented as an image b) PDFs of enormous amounts of classical music are available, in public domain, at the International Music Score Library Project (imslp.org). For example, Chopin's coverage is virtually comprehensive.
So the question is, how to get more excerpts into more articles faster? Can anyone think of a tool (or propose one) that would make this easier?
Currently, my workflow looks like this: 1) Find an article about a piece of music 2) Check if it wants another excerpt. If not, go back to 1. 3) Go to imslp, search (using their crappy search) for the piece (or in many cases, just follow a link from the wikipedia article). 4) Choose one of the scores, click it 5) Verify that it's suitable, is the right piece etc. 6) Screenshot a piece of it using Snagit, save image as PNG. 7) Go to commons.wikimedia.org 8) Click upload 9) Fill in the form. This bit is complicated because there are so many "authors"/sources: chopin, the publisher, the user at imslp that uploaded/scanned it, imslp, me.... And choosing a name is always annoying...let alone categories. 10) Upload. 11) Back at the article page, click "edit" 12) Add a [[Image:...]] tag with some creative text. 13) Preview 14) Save
It's pretty frickin' tedious. Here's one I did earlier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnes_Op._27_(Chopin)
It would be nicer, at least, if one could upload the entire thing, then on the article page do a crop to the excerpt - rather than having to crop it locally.
Any ideas anyone? Magnus's FIST was great, dealing with the much harder problem of trying to identify any images anywhere vaguely related to the article. Here, we know exactly what image we want, and we know where to get it.
Steve
On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 6:51 PM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, It is the happy circumstance that: a) Articles about pieces of classical music are much better with an excerpt of the music presented as an image b) PDFs of enormous amounts of classical music are available, in public domain, at the International Music Score Library Project (imslp.org). For example, Chopin's coverage is virtually comprehensive.
PDF to image(s) is a nice idea, within limits. But for music the best way would be to use something like WikiTex (wikisophia.org), which turns Lilypond code via LaTeX into a rendered PNG of the music, along with a downloadable .mid file.
But it's been on the burner for like 4-5 years now because, *AIUI, nobody can patch the security holes associated with taking complex input, and anyway nobody wants sheet music, tengwar, go, chess, flowcharts, sylized greek, and plotted graphs handled computatively or editably through Wikipedia.
-S
On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 11:07 AM, stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
PDF to image(s) is a nice idea, within limits. But for music the best way would be to use something like WikiTex (wikisophia.org), which turns Lilypond code via LaTeX into a rendered PNG of the music, along with a downloadable .mid file.
Sure, Lilypond is nice - but typesetting it is a lot more work than simply screenshotting an existing PDF. And IMHO old publications (eg, 1902) look nicer than Lilypond...
Fwiw, the workflow I've ended up going with goes like this: 1. Load up the PDF for one opus (generally 2-3 compositions) 2. Screenshot 2-3 excerpts per piece 3. Upload all the screenshots, tweaking the contents of an info template, rather than filling in fields 4. Stick all the screenshots in the relevant article.
In other words, batching each phase of the operation, rather than doing the whole cycle for each excerpt. I've now done all the nocturnes except the last two posthumous ones. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnes_Op._9_(Chopin)
Steve
On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 3:59 AM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Sure, Lilypond is nice - but typesetting it is a lot more work than simply screenshotting an existing PDF. And IMHO old publications (eg, 1902) look nicer than Lilypond...
Fwiw, the workflow I've ended up going with goes like this:
- Load up the PDF for one opus (generally 2-3 compositions)
- Screenshot 2-3 excerpts per piece
- Upload all the screenshots, tweaking the contents of an info
template, rather than filling in fields 4. Stick all the screenshots in the relevant article.
In other words, batching each phase of the operation, rather than doing the whole cycle for each excerpt. I've now done all the nocturnes except the last two posthumous ones. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnes_Op._9_(Chopin)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnes_Op._9_%28Chopin%29
I understand. And the necessity of editable notation, presentation as an image, and output as audio media is not yet substantiated for any WikiMedia projects. Someone would have to demonstrate that such editable notation was useful in some way, like for transcribing certain motifs, phrasings, etc., or helping music education overseas.
-S