Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Opera/Archive 63

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The (Dis)infobox

Disinfoboxes
A box aggressively attracts the marginally  literate eye with apparent promises to contain a  reductive summary of information that can't be  neatly contained. Like a bulleted list, or a time-  line that substitutes for genuine history, it offers  a competitive counter-article, stripped of nuance.  As a substitute for accuracy and complexity a box  trumps all discourse.

I thought I'd share this brilliant creation by Wetman. Says it all really. I found it at the Ponte Vecchio talk page, where he went on to say (out of the box)...

"The default situation with these boxes of misinformation is no infobox. If an editor without information adds dates of former bridges at a location, then equally misinformed and lazy Wikipedia readers will be misled into thinking Ponnte Vecchio is a rebuilding of a tenth-century bridge. Other hobbyists without information will add it in a "timeline of bridges". This is irresponsible at Wikipedia, no matter how much hobbyists' energies are involved in creating boxed substitutes for nuanced history. Why? Because disinformation snowballs without informed correction. Competence is the issue here. This is a general problem, of which the Ponte Vecchio disinfobox is just one little incident example."

Maybe we should hire him to re-write these for us.;-) Best, Voceditenore (talk) 17:41, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Excellent. I can't see why the infoboxers don't just start their own Wikipedia with no text only infoboxes. --Folantin (talk) 18:41, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. Once again we see how much these boxes are disliked - throughout WP. --Kleinzach 00:10, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

That's probably the finest send-up of the damn things, and precise description of what is wrong with them, I've yet seen. Kudos to Wetman. I want more people to see this. Antandrus (talk) 00:33, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes indeed. I found this a useful opportunity to think about infoboxes in a context where I don't have any personal connection to the subject matter and thus am more like a "normal reader." When I looked at the infoboxed version, it didn't seem too offensive. But then I looked at the last noninfoboxed version ([1]) and realized how badly the infobox distracts our attention from the far more helpful introductory paragraph. Opus33 (talk) 03:41, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Vocal pedagogy

I have recently done a major overhaul of this page and would like some feedback. I have also suggested that vocal technique be merged into vocal pedagogy. There are still some major vocal pedagogical topics I haven't touched on yet but they are in the works. Regardless, I added a lot to the history section and created the entire section on Topics of study. Thanks everyone.Nrswanson (talk) 05:21, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Merging the two articles is a good idea though I prefer Vocal technique as a title. The word 'pedagogy' is a bit offputting for non-Americans. --Kleinzach 08:08, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

I disagree. Vocal pedagogy is an academic field of study internationally (NATS now has chapters in over 25 countries) and it should be properly titled. Also under that title one can cover different professions within the field as well as vocal technique.Nrswanson (talk) 14:25, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Russian opera articles

This is one of Meladina's old articles that I had forgotten about. Should we rename it 'List of . .' or (more radically) merge it with other lists of composers, librettists etc.? Or? --Kleinzach 05:11, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

The Russian opera corpus? Moreschi (talk) (debate) 15:55, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Moreschi's proposal seems fine to me. Looking at this article prompts me to nominate Dmitri Bortnyansky and his operas for a forthcoming Composer of the Month.........Smerus (talk) 07:41, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Russian opera articles isn't like the Opera corpus, which lists only the composer and individual opera articles. It is really more like a topic map for a specialized area. It also includes singers, patrons, companies, theatres etc. The title Russian opera corpus would be misleading. It's actually much more like List of opera topics in this respect. By the way, I copy-edited it yesterday for idiomatic English (it may need more). Voceditenore (talk) 08:15, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Category:Vocal ranges

I would like to suggest that this category's title be retitled Category:Voice types as vocal range is only one of many characteristics considered when designating a person's voice. It just doesn't make sense to have all the sub-types like "lyric soprano" and "spinto soprano" (which have the same listed vocal range) under this cat. It does make sense to have them all under voice type.Nrswanson (talk) 10:18, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Category:Operatic sopranos

I am not clear why this category (and those of others voice types) bears the title "operatic". These are "Classical sopranos" (etc.) who may, or may not, include opera as part of a broader career. Emma Kirkby, for example, has appeared in opera very rarely indeed and could never sensibly be termed an opera singer; she is a "classical soprano" who specialises in early music. TFM04 (talk) 13:55, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Category:Operatic sopranos etc. categorize singers who have sung opera. These categories are not exclusive. Singers can also be put in other categories - including of course Emma Kirkby - but that will come under the scope of other projects. --Kleinzach 14:15, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Beijing opera and Chinese opera

someone add these two articles here please —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.160.244.71 (talk) 23:08, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

No, this project doesn't cover Chinese opera. Chinese opera comes directly under Performing arts. (Western) opera and Chinese 'opera' have nothing in common except the use of the Italian word. --Kleinzach 23:15, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

I have removed Opera project template from Talk:Beijing opera and Talk:Chinese opera. It was added by the 68.160.244.71 on 25th June. Kleinzach, do you think we should put the words "Western operas" into our project intro or scope? - Jay (talk) 01:57, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't think we should use Western opera. Opera is the word we use in European languages for the European art form. The Chinese don't use the word opera - they have their own terms: 戏曲 xìqǔ etc. --Kleinzach 02:07, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Assessment proposal

I'm taking as my starting-point the notion that our major operation is creating and improving articles about operas and that this is where we should start the assessment process. Various ways of tackling this systematically spring to mind (for example, going through Category:Operas or the numerous Category:Operas by composer categories), but what I'd like to see done initially is a trawl through the (apparently) 309 articles listed in the List of important operas. The object here is to get a feel for the assessment process and to see how long it takes, but also to see what needs improving in what should be our flagship articles.

I have various other ideas, but I'll stop here for now and ask for comments on the above (and volunteers to do the assessing!). --GuillaumeTell 15:25, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Well . . . I was hoping you'd give us a more detailed plan, proposing assessment methods, test runs and samples. One thing I'd like to emphasize right from the start is that - in my opinion - contributors should never assess articles to which they have made contributions. --Kleinzach 15:26, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm just trying to proceed one step at a time. Maybe I should have asked some specific questions:

• Do we start with articles on operas?
• Is this set of articles a good place to start?

By the way, I'll be away for most of the fortnight starting on Friday, so I'm in no great hurry. --GuillaumeTell 16:48, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

IMO you need to start by considering your methods (points system or not?) and the extent of the work on each rating, working out how many assessments you can do each week. Then you can work out how to apply it to 5,000 articles - probably via some test runs. --Kleinzach 00:27, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

You don't seem to have noticed that my proposal above relates to 309 articles, not 5000. That's a test run. As for "points system or not", I thought that we'd sorted that out during the Wagner exercise. "Working out how many assessments you can do in a week" is a meaningless exercise, since we all have other things to do and in any given week, any one of us will have an unknowable amount of time available.

I'm still hoping that someone will answer the questions above and that volunteers will come forward to help with this. --GuillaumeTell 00:48, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

309 articles - six times the size of the Wagner Project - would be large for a test run. IMO you'd need three teams (assuming three members per team) - otherwise the test run would go on for months and nobody would be able to remember the point of it. --Kleinzach 06:11, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Good ideas and I agree that List of important operas would be a great place to start. I personally would like to suggest that we remove all of the ratings currently on articles since some articles really are "start" articles. If we have everything at a start level (as we do right now except for the stubs) it will be hard to know what articles have been rated yet and which haven't as the assessment process continues. By removing the ratings, all the articles will be in the unassessed category. They will be automatically removed from the category once an assessment has been made through whatever process we decide. I think this is the best way to make sure every article gets assessed and nothing falls through the cracks. This will also catch newly created articles in categories that we may have already looked at in the middle of the assessment process. It will also prevent un-needed reassessment on articles that fall in more than one category (example Placido Domingo). Also, one of the nice features of the Banner I created is that (unlike the current banner) it doesn't advertise the fact that no assessment has been made in such an obvious way so the non-project member is un-likely to notice the lack of assessment. This takes the pressure off us to get all the articles assessed right away. We can take as much time as we need. I think we also need to finish creating rating scales for the all the different kinds of opera articles (composers, opera companies, etc). I am also for creating an importance scale.Nrswanson (talk) 16:16, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

There are more than 3,000 nominally start class articles. I don't think it's practical to remove these nominal ratings. In any case it's clear that the ratings are nominal because there are no written comments/reviews. --Kleinzach 15:33, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Also, I've added a note at the top of the Assessment page about this. But I'm now trying to remember why you and I agreed to allocate Start to these articles in the first place. And don't you have a tame Bot-owner who could remove them all if that now seems to be a good idea? --GuillaumeTell 16:48, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

It was my view that the only practical way to begin assessments was to automatically uprate all non-stubs as start. The logic was this: if a stub was automatically a stub, then a non-stub should be automatically a non-stub. You apparently agreed with this at the time. In the case of the Wagner Project, three assessors took a few weeks to assess 50 articles one by one. With the Opera Project there are 5,000 articles so a different strategy is needed. So, all in all I don't think it's a good idea to retreat one step and remove nominal assessments when there is no strategy worked out, and no assessment team (I think you need a minimum of three) has come forward. --Kleinzach 23:50, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

That may be true Kleinzach but there is no easy way to find an article without comments unless you are looking at the article directly. This means that we may potentially miss some of those 3,000 start articles during the assessment process. There is an easy way to find an unassessed article. I believe a bot could easily remove all of the current assessments. Honestly I don't see any other way for this assessment to be done thoroughly without removing the current assessment ratings. The potential for articles slipping through the cracks is just too high otherwise. The advantage of removing the assessments is it would give us a complete and accurate list of which articles have not yet been evaluated. Something that we don't have right now with all of those preliminary ratings. Nrswanson (talk) 18:31, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

There are 5,000 articles here. Any assessment team would will need to keep full records. A system would have to be in place. If you have the necessary procedures (of the kind I was expecting GT to propose) it may yet be viable. However if it is only GT and Nathan involved, I think you two will have to have a serious chat between yourselves to find out who is going to have the bright ideas and who is going to do the work. If neither of you are volunteering on the work side, then some caution will be required. Anyway starting off with completely undoing the last completed stage of the process (the auto start class), without any plan in place, would be lunacy in my humble opinion. --Kleinzach 00:14, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Well I honestly never understood the point of the auto start class which only seems to muddy the waters and make the whole keeping tabs on what articles have been individually assessed and which haven't difficult to keep track of. Also, when new articles are created it would be easy to miss them if they are automatically assessed. I think the best thing to do is to leave every article unassessed until it has been assessed. This is the easiest way to keep track of articles. I personally think the best way to do assessment would be to systematically go down through the categories. New articles, however, may be created so we will need to go back through the unassessed cat at the end to evaluate articles we may have missed. This might meen that some of the more important articles are not assessed right away but it would be the most efficient method.Nrswanson (talk) 04:05, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

It's obvious to everybody that nominal assessments are those without reasoned comments. Nominal assessments have been done by all the related projects (except Richard Wagner where rating was done by GT, Peter Cohen and myself). Removing Opera Project nominal rating will simply leave those by other projects (such as the Biography Project) in place. They will be the assessments used by WP (WP:1) for opera articles.

Let's consider . . . the project is currently growing by more than 3 articles a day. How will you keep up with this development, manage and assess the articles? If you don't have a plan in place, it's pointless to talk about undoing work that has already been completed at some considerable effort. --Kleinzach 06:01, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Kleinzach none of those articles have been truly assessed since many of them are probably B articles or better. We are going to have to look at each one individually anyway. So I don't see how the "current work" has accomplished anything remotely helpful or productive. As for getting "caught up" I am not worried about it. It will take as long as it takes and I see no reason to do assessment unless it is going to be helpful and productive to the project. And as for the plan, part of the plan is having a way of monitoring which articles have and have not been assessed. Since no real assessments have been made we should remove all of the fake assessments so the category of unassessed opera articles is accurate and therefore a useful tool in monitoring the assessment process.Nrswanson (talk) 06:38, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Right, well, the only two people who are interested in doing any assessments, as far as I can see, are Nrswanson and me. I'm quite happy with that, but if anyone else is interested but hasn't yet spoken, please say so. As I've said, I will be mostly away for 15 days starting on Friday. However, before I go, I am going to start on the List of important operas, beginning at the top, using the points system in conjunction with the ranking descriptions. I will not assess any article to which I myself have contributed to a significant extent. I will provide comments for each article assessed, and I will use the heading "Comments from WikiProject Opera", so that our comments don't get mixed up with other Projects' comments. I'll sign my comments in the usual way. I'll report back here before I go. Nathan, while I'm away, could you look at what I've done and add anything you think I've missed or any reservations about my comments (but please don't alter my comments - we can discuss any disagreements when I'm back). If you have time, perhaps you could begin at the bottom of the list and work upwards, again skipping articles to which you are a significant contributor. Any questions or thoughts? --GuillaumeTell 21:37, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Sounds good. My only thought is that if we add my banner we could actually use the comments page built in to the banner for assessment. That way our assessment wouldn't even be on the article's talk page.Nrswanson (talk) 22:17, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

It's my bedtime now, but I've just done the first opera on the list, L'Orfeo, as a demonstration. As promised by HappyMelon of happy memory, once the comments page is created, a rather inelegant (but usable for now) reference to the existence of a comments page and a "show" invitation magically appear at the bottom of the banner - so there is currently a built-in facility. If/when your banner replaces the current one, those comments will be similarly visible. BTW, it's important to sign your comments as well as making clear that these are from WP:WPO, and I've added that to my instructions above. Any other Project's banner that has enabled comments will show our comments as well as theirs (if any), but that's life. I'll do some more operas tomorrow, as time permits --GuillaumeTell 00:50, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm. I don't think pressing on regardless is really the way to go. It would be better to get the support of the project as a whole. Personally I'm not against individual assessments . . . my suggestion would be to rate half a dozen or so articles, then stop and have an evaluation (here). If you carry on, and don't tell people your methods etc, you risk making a mess of the whole thing. --Kleinzach 02:49, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

The project as a whole, excepting you (sort of), me, Nathan and Peter Cohen, has shown no interest whatsoever, but as things stand (see below) I'm not going to think about this until next weekend at the earliest. --GuillaumeTell 10:01, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

I have assessed the following articles: Cadmus et Hermione, La liberazione di Ruggiero, Euridice (opera), Dafne, Gawain (opera), Nixon in China, and A Night at the Chinese Opera. I am stopping for now.Nrswanson (talk) 03:08, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Apologies for not doing any more at present, but I'm rushing around getting ready for my trip to Germany. Will try to put in some time on this next weekend. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to suggest a systematic plan of going through categories, such as I suggested up at the top, feel free. --GuillaumeTell 10:01, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

I think we should set up an assessment talk page. This would allow for a list of operas to assess to be maintained and people can put in bids for the ones they intend to do, thus avoiding duplication of effot when we have so few people interested in actually doing the work.--Peter cohen (talk) 11:20, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Opera/Assessment is available if you want to use it. --Kleinzach 11:54, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Key article improvement

But these "lists" you guys keep refering to are way too inclusive. Most of the articles on the To Do List are of low importance. I want something that highlights Enrico Caruso, Boito's Mefistofele, and other more important articles not things like A Wedding (opera) and the Berkshire Opera Company, etc. Nrswanson (talk) 08:41, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree. As Voceditenore suggested, we need another sub-page where we can list "core articles" which need improvement. General readers are more likely to judge our success by the quality of these articles rather than the more obscure areas. For instance, Pelléas et Mélisande (opera) is distinctly "sub-optimum" (to use the jargon word). --Folantin (talk) 08:54, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Added to Can you help? It would be more prominent there. Called 'Articles needing attention'? --Kleinzach 09:04, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

I can't see it. To be honest, I'd rather have a proper sub-page where we can list the core articles in need of attention and give comments about what needs doing to them. --Folantin (talk) 07:48, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

No, no, I was just referring to the visible link - but nobody is against this idea so why not just do it? --Kleinzach 08:03, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

OK, I've started the page here. If anyone wants to improve it, go ahead. --Folantin (talk) 08:17, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for doing that. I would like to suggest that along with this that we create a "key articles of the month" improvement box on the main page. Perhaps we could nominate one major opera, one major singer, one major composer, one major opera house/company, and one major opera director/conductor each month. Once the assessment process is complete perhaps the overall goal of this box would be to raise that article up at least one grade on the assessment scale.Nrswanson (talk) 11:03, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for looking through the operas for the list. I'd suggest we bold the most important ones and give them priority. Obviously, there's a subjective element to this, but I'm sure most people would agree we need to focus on Les pêcheurs de perles before La jolie fille de Perth, Lulu before Louise, La Cenerentola before La buona figliuola etc. "Perhaps we could nominate one major opera, one major singer, one major composer, one major opera house/company, and one major opera director/conductor each month." I agree. Good idea. --Folantin (talk) 16:09, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

You are welcome. Of course I just did a cursory look to see if they had a synopsis, references, etc. I didn't do a detailed read through all of the articles so of course I could have missed something. I agree with the bolding of the crème de la crème articles.Nrswanson (talk) 16:42, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

OK. I've gone through it quickly bolding a few, using no very strict method. Some are popular favourites, others are historically important. I've tried not to add items simply because I like them. Everyone else is free to go through the list and add and subtract as they like if my choice isn't satisfactory (e.g. I'm not that familiar with the 19th century Italian repertoire so my choices there are often guesses). It doesn't need to be scientific, but just try to think which articles a general reader is most likely to look at first. --Folantin (talk) 16:56, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Sounds and looks good. I am going to start working on opera companies/opera houses. Would someone mind tackeling opera composers?Nrswanson (talk) 17:00, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Mmm. I think this is now too long. Perhaps it needs to be a quarter of the size - or even less - to be practical. --Kleinzach 02:49, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

A shrunken list may or may not be good. It all depends on how we want to use the page. Everything on there right now has been taken from a list of important... with the exception of singers which were taken from the lists on the individual voice type pages (which sort of serves as a most important list for singers although I haven't monitored these lists beyond making sure they are in fact opera singers). The real question is how we want this list to be used and how would it be most helpful. For now I am compiling articles lacking in essential information from these lists with the exception of the singer articles where I included all of them because I didn't want to be the only one deciding which singers are or are not important. Whatever we decide, it's easy to trim things down once a group has been compiled. I would like to see a definitive plan for this page developed where we actually select articles from this list every month with the intent of improvement.Nrswanson (talk) 05:46, 27 June 2008 (UTC)