Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Opera/Archive 22

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SatyrBot

"Pelléas et Mélisande (opera) is part of WikiProject Classical music, which aims to improve, expand, cleanup, and maintain all articles related to classical music, that are not covered by other projects..." (my emphasis). So says a banner placed on the Pelléas Talk page by the above Bot. I'm putting a polite note on the WP:CM talk page. --GuillaumeTell 15:01, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

I think maybe it should be raise on User talk:SatyrTN which seems to be the official place for raising requests etc. for the bot. At the same time, we could maybe ask for all operas to be tagged as part of this project and think about how to do it for vocalists. --Peter cohen 15:45, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, for now it seemed best to raise it at Classical Music, as it's they who will have told SatyrTN what the bot should do (and, presumably, what not to do) and they would have to agree to any changes. (And they will have OK'd the wording in the banner that I highlighted above.) If nothing happens, I'll get onto SatyrTN directly. --GuillaumeTell 16:20, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Hello from WikiProject Classical music. We've sorted out the tag. I afraid there will always be some small collateral damage from a bot adding banners, especially in an area such as this. The problem was either we would avoid collateral damage but miss a lot of classical pieces, or some articles that shouldn't be tagged, end up being tagged. I feel I've reached a happy medium. I've been detagging any operas that have been wrongly tagged and if you do spot any I've missed, do tell me or just remove it yourself. I've informed Satyr who runs the bot, and hopefully tonight's run will be smoother.

The banner has also been reworded to avoid problems with overlaps with WikiProject Ballet for example, where the music and the actual ballet are in a lot of cases separate things. However your discussion has led to another discussion appearing over categories. Some editors feel it is unjustified to have categories such as Category:Operas by Ludwig van Beethoven, which are just one article . But I feel they help organise classical music by keeping opera separate from orchestral and choral compositions. Please come to our talk page and add your thoughts to the discussion, as any decision over this would inevitably affect WikiProject Opera. Centy 20:34, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick and helpful response. It looks as if maybe we ought to be a bit more rigorous here, and always go for "Category Operas by nn" rather than "Compositions by nn", even if nn wrote only one opera (or only one notable opera, or only one opera that editors have got round to writing up). Perhaps we need to get SatyrBot to work on this (and on Peter c's suggestions above). --GuillaumeTell 00:06, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Enthusiastic agreement here. I was about to write in identical terms. We've always had a close relationship with the Composers Project and we should keep in touch with the Classical Music Project as well. Asking for SatyrBot's help is a very good idea. I can imagine a number of ways in which this could help us. I support Peter's idea of starting with tagging all operas. -- Kleinzach 05:43, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

A prompt has appeared on my page about this. I've never been involved with bots before. If someone knows how they work, could they deal with the request, please? I'm assuming that operas will be relatively easy to flag. With composers and performers, the boundatu between our project and the classical music one will be harder to decide because most people will have feet in both camps. --Peter cohen 06:49, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Here's how SatyrBot works when tagging project banners. The bot works by tagging everything that shares a category with its 'project' page. Firstly you have to make an exhaustive list of all categories and subcategories you want to tag. The owner quite right does not set the bot to tag all subcategories in a category, only the articles directly in that category. This stops the bot going haywire and tagging things it shouldn't. This is exactly why I believe we should keep Operas by X and Compositions by X separate.

Once the list is compiled, contact User:SatyrTN who runs the bot. He's a perfectly nice person and is very co-operative. He will run the bot every night (EST) for about an hour and this will usually get 500 or so pages done. During the day, you can check if everything went smoothly before the next night's run. SatyrBot maintains WP:CM's to-do list and I highly recommend it for project banner tagging. Centy 16:00, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. That should allow operas to be flagged. What about people? Verdi or Wagner could be considered opera composers who happened to write the odd other piece of music, Strauss and Mozart are people with substantial output in both opera and other musical fields, Beethoven and Schubert are major composers of symphonic and chamber music who happen to have written the odd opera. Similarly you have performers like Varviso and Windgassen who are largely known for their opera interpretations and Haitinck and Fischer-Dieskau who have reputations both as opera performers and as performers in symphonic music or Lieder. Do they get tagged as covered by both projects, or what? --Peter cohen 16:48, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Composers - you should bring up with WP:Composers. As for performers, WikiProject Classical music doesn't cover musicians, so feel free to tag those if you want. Centy 17:30, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm posting on both the G&S and composer project pages to discuss whether we tag their pages or not. I notice that in Category:Opera singers we have specific subcategories for operatic baritones and divas. Other vocal ranges are just under singers by range. How do people want to deal with this inconsistency? --Peter cohen 14:31, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

The divas category is quite old (and quite silly, IMNSHO), but the operatic baritones category (and its subcategories) is fairly new. I contacted its creator (User:Brandon97) on 5 May to ask him whether he was going to go on into other voice types, and he said he hoped to, but in fact he hasn't, and his last edits were on 7 May. There are a couple of other baritone queries on his Talk page, and the last one, at least, hasn't been answered, so he's either away or very busy, or he's taken his bat home.

I'd generally favour better classification of other opera singers, with some sort of period subdivision, too - something like French operatic sopranos born 1800-1850 (not, please not, French operatic sopranos born in 1801, French operatic sopranos born in 1802 ...). --GuillaumeTell 16:55, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Shall I hold off the singers (apart from operatic baritones and operatic singers by nationality) until we're clearer what we want to do here? --Peter cohen 17:10, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I replied to Peter re: G&S project pages. They are all already tagged with the G&S project tag and assessment, so please don't also tag them with the opera project tag. Thanks. -- Ssilvers 17:07, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I've had some initial feedback from G&S with someone not wanting the G&S stuff tagged with opera (and hey! he (Ssilvers) has fed back here too). Leaving Category:Operas by Arthur Sullivan out is easy. Unfortunately, Category:Comic Operas and Category:English-language operas contain some suspiciously G&S-lkooking works. And of course G&S are Categorised as opera librettist and composer respectively. Anyone know how Satyrbot works well enough to know whether we can get it not to tag anything already tagged by G&S or to ignore all articles in the G&S-specific categories even though they appear in other places too? --Peter cohen 17:13, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm not exactly familiar with Satyrbot, but I think that all the bots work in similar ways, using Boolean logic. So you could say things like "if article is in category x (but not in category y or category z) and doesn't have tag OperaProject, then add that tag". The NewArticle bot discussed here a few weeks ago was looking for words like opera, tenor, singer, and initially produced a lot of noise - until it was told to ignore anything with "opera" if that word was preceded by "soap". There's still some noise, but it's much more manageable. --GuillaumeTell 21:08, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I've had a reply from Mr Satyrbot himself (or Ms,herself) saying that the bot can be told not tag articles already tagged by G&S. So, in that case, we can go for more or less everything under Category:opera and its subcategories apart from the G&S tagged stuff and some of the voice ranges which might include non-opera people. ENO and other stuff that is of interest to both G&S and ourselves can be tagged by hand. That is if we agree to go for the bot after the discussion in the thread below. --Peter cohen 22:13, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Is it possible to do this stage by stage? I'd recommend starting with works (operas) which should be better categorized than people. -- Kleinzach 02:44, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Category deletion/English-language operetta

How can we delete Category:English-language operetta? Nothing is in it. -- Ssilvers 13:43, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Does the category actually exist? Category:English-language operetta links red. If it's being used in an article but linking red, just remove it from that article. Cheers, Moreschi ^Talk 13:48, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, add an "s" at the end: Category:English-language operettas. -- Ssilvers 13:55, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Oh, I see. It seems to be a valid enough category, maybe add to some articles rather than delete it? There are operettas in English, but they don't constitute 100 percent of operettas, so the category might be useful. What do others think? Cheers, Moreschi ^Talk 13:58, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I thought we had agreed that Category:Comic operas covers these? -- Ssilvers 14:03, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

It was agreed at a recent CfD that Category:Comic operas would be renamed to Category:English comic operas, and the actual renaming will happen soon. If it is agreed that all English comic operas are operettas, then Category:English comic operas should be a sub-category of Category:Operettas.

So I think that the usefulness of Category:English-language operettas depends on the number of English-language operettas which are not English comic operas. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:44, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm. I think operettas and English Comic operas are both subcategories of comic opera. -- Ssilvers 17:08, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Gulp! There are an awful lot of operettas that aren't very comic.

Anyway, the category English-language operettas was created today, by User:Piniricc65, so it seems a bit premature to put it up for deletion just yet.

However, I'm not very clear about what it might contain. One important matter is that (as I understand it) the term "operetta" is widely used in the USA for works by Gilbert and Sullivan, whereas G&S actually designated them "comic operas", and that's how they are thought of in Britain. As I say from time to time, the best way of allocating genre categories to operas is to use the terms that were used by their creators.

Who's going to volunteer to talk about this to Piniricc65? I've got work to do on Gilbert Duprez and a whole bunch of Verdi operas. --GuillaumeTell 17:16, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Alot of us G&S fans in the U.S. try to respect Gilbert and and Sullivan and Carte's intention to use the term "comic operas". Also, the German Reeds, Frederic Clay, F. C. Burnand, Alfred Cellier, Edward German, and their contemporaries all used the words "comic opera" as a way to distinguish what they were doing from the continental European operettas. Also, the scholars who write about these works, Stedman, Jacobs, Ainger, Crowther, etc. use the term "comic opera". So, I agree that the best thing would be to use the term "comic opera" that was used by the creators, and to reflect that in the names of the categories. -- Ssilvers 18:42, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

See Category talk:English-language operettas. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)

I withdraw my suggestion that this cat be deleted. Victor Herbert works, Desert Song, Bitter Sweet and that sort of thing would work fine there. But it seems that if there is a subcat for English-language operettas, there needs to be one for French, German, and any other language group with a significant number of operettas. Best regards, -- Ssilvers 18:49, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Having read all the above, I am in favour of deleting 'English-language operettas' and moving the items to 'Operettas'. Without going into a whole lot of detail, mixing by genre and by language cats can be problematic (as most genres are overwhelmingly in one language etc. I think that's the consensus now anyway, isn't it? -- Kleinzach 02:27, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

So what categories are we settling for?

Whilst populating Category:Operas by Michael Tippett fully, I noticed that of the five operas, one is in the both Category:Operas and the by year subcategory, two are in just the year category and two are in neither. Have we reached a consensus or are we stil arg^h^h^h discussing the subject vigorously? --Peter cohen 18:18, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Nothing has changed. Our policy remains to have all works in Category:Operas. I hope this will help in fnding most of them. -- Kleinzach

Right I've added the one you missed to operas. --Peter cohen 19:47, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Projects do not make policies. WP:CAT#Some_general_guidelines still applies, and no clear reason has ever been advanced why Operas should be an exception to the rule. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)

Bot tagging of projects

Hi from someone at Composers -- thanks for mentioning the possible bot tagging there. Though my thoughts on the matter are rather mild (and possibly irrelevant), I think that bot tagging of projects is not a good idea (by any project, Opera or otherwise). I guess I see it as a sort of marking of territory before the humans arrive. I've written articles on various people and within a hour or completing the article, biobot (or whatever it's called) tags the talk page as part of WP:BIO, "Please coordinate with us to improve this page!" or something like that, and I must say it's a bit of a turn off toward contributing. Bot tagging of pages seems an easy way for projects to start biting off more than they can chew: if a person needs to make the edit, have the page added to a watchlist, etc., then project limits tend to be more restricted (and thus useful). -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 17:45, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I agree in general. I think manual tagging is definitely preferable. AFAIK the only articles I've tagged with the Project:Opera template are those I've worked on myself (and more often than not I've created them from scratch). I think it's OK to use project templates on talk pages if your project has at least some intention to work on the articles. I have problems with some of the bigger projects bot-tagging everything in sight when their members rarely if ever turn up to improve them (it's even worse when they give 30-second assessments of articles in those boxes, but let's not go there). In my opinion, these project templates are way too big too and they tend to crowd out discussion on the talk pages which are supposed to be for, you know, talk. --Folantin 18:05, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

It sounds like I should hold off doing any more work on this until we have a consensus. --Peter cohen 18:26, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, I don't have any strong objections to Project:Composers or Project:Classical Music tagging the articles (I consider myself a member of both those enterprises in any case). These are smallish yet highly productive projects and it's better they put the templates there (even with a bot) rather than some of the enormous conglomerates with "eyes bigger than their bellies" (!). --Folantin 18:32, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, we don't rate articles at present. Looking at teh text of the tag: "This article is a part of the Opera WikiProject" could perhaps be softened to "This article falls within the scope of...". This should prevent any feelings of our nicking a new article and the accompanying kudos from under the feet of the author. The rest looks non agressive and "New members are very welcome!" is quite inviting. --Peter cohen 22:26, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

All our people pages have already been trawled by the three Biography Project bots and have been (or will be marked up) for the attention of the Musician Work Group (a k a Musicians Project), a sub-project of the Biography Project, for assessment, infoboxes etc. (The Musicians Project is a popular music project). This can be seen, for example on Talk:Giuseppe Verdi, look at the categories at the foot of the page.

I am in favour of using a bot to put opera banners on all our pages in order to retain influence over the editing of the articles. If we use a bot to go through the pages, we will know what has been created so far, and be able to monitor them. (We now have about 2,500 to 3,500 articles in total so hand bannering is not really practical at this stage of our development.)

If the Opera Project is to continue I think it is inevitable that we will have to do assessments (much as I dislike the idea) and bannering is the first step in that direction. The alternative is to allow the Biography Project or whoever to dumb down the articles to a WP norm (as the Japanese say, "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down") - or simply to quit and go and work on a closed wiki devoted solely to opera.

I also think there's a good case for redesigning our banner so it is smaller and less obtrusive. -- Kleinzach 02:13, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

I've just noticed that I was asked by the bot's owner whether we wanted ratings included in the tag. The bot can automatically insert stub ratings to all articles belonging to a stub category. --Peter cohen 13:07, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes I am favour of doing this. -- Kleinzach 23:34, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

A question that I think is relevant to this bot discussion: do dramatic oratorios fall under the purview of this WikiProject or the Classical Music one? I'm thinking of Hector Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust offhand. I don't expect a bot to be able to tag cases like this if there is some ambiguity. --Kyoko 13:41, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Both? If they've never been staged as an opera, then probably not here, but if they frequently are, then we might as well have 'em. Moreschi ^Talk

Agree per Moreschi. -- Kleinzach 23:34, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

As stated by me elsewhere, there is Category:Opera oratorios that is a sub-category of both. Only has tweo memebrs at present, but perhaps it could be expanded.

Two new articles on historic opera houses

I've recently created two articles on historic opera houses in Milan - the Teatro Dal Verme and the Teatro Lirico. Neither of them are active as opera houses today, and in fact, the Teatro Lirico is closed at the moment, but each of them saw several notable opera premieres and stage debuts in their heyday and are mentioned in various Wikpedia articles on singers, composers, and operas. I've put Opera Project banners on them, but please remove them if you think they're inappropriate. Also, the Teatro Lirico is a bit problematic in that it was called the Teatro alla Canobbiana from 1779 until 1894 when Sonzogno took it over. I've made a redirect page from the Teatro alla Canobbiana to the Teatro Lirico page where both names are mentioned. Voceditenore 14:14, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Great- me and various other users have put forward the idea of creating a List of historical opera houses which these could be added to. Gustav von Humpelschmumpel 15:21, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Excellent articles! This is one of our major gaps. Using re-directs to cope with name changes is also helpful. -- Kleinzach 01:38, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Removing stub status

I got out my programme for Der Prinz von Homburg earlier and tinkered with the article. I decided it no longer merited being a stub and removed the status, but was I meant to ask for permission or something? --Peter cohen 19:18, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

You don't need permission. If the article has some substance, references, cats, etc. and it's been expanded to more than a couple paragraphs, its probably not a stub any more. I looked at the article, and it certainly needs more information, but I agree with your judgment that it's not a stub any more. Best regards, -- Ssilvers 21:20, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Ta. I may find a bit more to put in, there's some stuff by Henze talking about th emusical language, but I tend not to like writing act by act summaries unless I have th elibretto to work form. Otherwise it looks too much like plagiarism. ==Peter cohen 21:57, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

More voice types

I've just created and am working on The Silver Tassie. If you look at the cast list, it calls for heroic baritone and high soprano. Are these voice types we theoretically intend to create articles for? Or should I remove the square brackets?

'heroic baritone' probably corresonds to this and for 'high soprano', perhaps just present it as: high soprano and let the reader draw their own concusions? Voceditenore 21:21, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't think we need more voice category articles. I think you can say coloratura soprano if that's what she is, or just lyric soprano, dramatic baritone, or lyric tenor, etc. -- Ssilvers 21:24, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Okay square brackets rearranged. --Peter cohen 22:00, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

POV edits

Today a new editor made a large number of edits to articles to add information about Light Opera Works recordings/translations of operettas and its conductor Philip Kraus. It's nice to have new information, but almost all of the edits state that these recordings/translations are by far the best, have been adopted as the English-language standard, remedy the appaling state of things prior to their appearance, etc. Can someone take a look at the edits and, if you agree, say something diplomatic at User Talk:Paxart? Best regards, -- Ssilvers 03:06, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Hmmmm. I've seen the edits. Some are useful but many at the very least lack citations, e.g. "This translation was a major improvement on the antiquated and stilted Stange version. [...] It now appears to be the version of choice in contemporary productions."

But I fear they also smack of of self-promotion. If you look at the edit history for Philip Kraus and at the Image Info for the photo on that page, it's pretty obvious what's going on. You could try adding this to the user page in question, although it's not terribly friendly... Or put on every one of the POV assertions and mention the problem on the articles' talk pages (more laborious but less personalised). Best, Voceditenore 11:16, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually there's a much more friendly warning template here. I also notice that 'Paxart' adds misleading links, e.g. here (until Ssilvers recently removed it). The wording on the link implies it will take the reader to a new translation, but in fact it takes you to the Philip Kraus Homepage. When you finally find the page about his translations, all it does is tell you how to buy them. He does the same thing here and here. He currently has 10 of his translations on offer there. I wouldn't be surprised if his link appears on the Wikipedia articles for the 7 remaining operas and operettas before long. ;-) Voceditenore 15:36, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I used the friendly template that you suggested. I have tried to remove the commercial links and trim down some of the POV. Clearly, he is very bitter about his departure from the Chicago company in 1999. They seem to have wiped all mention of his name from their website, and he retaliated by removing all the information from their Wikipedia article that discussed matters after 1999. If he responds well to the edits, he could become a valuable contributor. Please do make any further edits necessary. Best regards, -- Ssilvers 18:16, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

List of recordings by Plácido Domingo‎

I added a link in Domingo's article to go to List of recordings by Plácido Domingo‎. I like to know your opinion especially about the album cover. Are we allowed to use them? Like in this case, the article is about Domingo’s recordings – audio CD/DVD etc – so I think the usage of “album covers” suit the article, what do you guys think? I will add list of his recorded operas and compilation albums soon. I really like that old man :)) - Jay 05:49, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Others will know more about this than I do, but I think that using an album cover counts as "fair use". There are certainly zillions of them all over Wikipedia.

Anyway, good work so far, but from the point of view of the Opera Project, I feel a little uneasy that Domingo's opera recordings are going to take second place to other, er, stuff. --GuillaumeTell 21:05, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

I have adding the list of “opera recordings” (most of the recordings) and I believe I only missed out few more, mostly those in VHS or VCD formats. If any of you know any other, please add on the list. I also have moved the opera recordings to #1. Ps- I never knew that I actually have almost all of the DVDs (90% from the list) in my personal collection! Wow! I only noticed when I have done compiling the list :)) - Jay 15:42, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

In case if you guys are wondering why I used Teatro Alla Scala instead of La Scala (as agreed for Wiki EN), it is because that is the name used in most of the DVD/VCD/VHS covers. - Jay 16:10, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

We can't use CD/DVD covers. Makemi and I have been involved in taking them off pages. The policy is at Wikipedia:Non-free content. The reason is that we are not promoting/reviewing the recordings which is the basic condition for using them. (IMO they also look tacky.)

Teatro alla Scala is fine as an alternative to La Scala, bit note small 'a' alla. DVDs are notorious for being badly edited! Please don't copy from them as that will introduce lots of errors! Best. -- Kleinzach 00:47, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Re Lear again

Now that this article isn't to be deleted, what is to be done? Two possibilities spring to mind:

• Ignore the article and include all relevant information on the Verdi page
• Improve the article and add a suitable link from the Verdi page

There was also a suggestion that the article should be renamed. I rather favour this, whichever of the above options are followed, as there are at least two articles not about Verdi's opera project that currently link to it. --GuillaumeTell 21:33, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

After doing some searches on Google and IMDb, I think that the other articles refer to non-operatic versions of King Lear, i.e. what appears to be a television movie that was aired in Italy and Brazil, and a performance of the Shakespeare play in Italian translation. --Kyoko 14:03, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Renaming would be a good idea. (I am shocked that it wasn't deleted. Just shows how idiotic the notability policy can be when it is misapplied.) How about moving relevant info to the biography and renaming article to make it absolutely clear that the opera doesn't exist? BTW what is the title of the Somma libretto? Grove gives 'Il re Lear'. -- Kleinzach 00:33, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

That's what Grove says in the Verdi article, but the Cammarano article has 'Re Lear'. The Italian-language articles cited in the Verdi article have both! I'll volunteer to do the work you suggest on both articles --GuillaumeTell 10:47, 30 May 2007 (UTC)