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Contents 1 Bands with a side project 2 Collaboration with MusicBrainz, please? 3 "Strong Language" 4 Same album, different countries & track listings 5 Timestamping Lyrics 6 Painful edit mode 7 sorting... 8 song on diff'rent albums 9 please speed deletion 10 <lyric> or <lyrics>? 11 live albums 12 Demographics and Translations 13 Links to other Websites 14 English translations of song titles 15 Automate redundant track listings 16 Image Categories 17 Discogs links 18 Album Navigation 19 Trying out new search functionality 20 Spam 21 Creation of Genre "Queercore" 22 Backing Tracks 23 "Too many connections" 24 Proposed new Main page layout 25 Putting same language together 26 Too Many Connections 27 AOTW nominations 28 Should Non-English Translations be kept? 29 Capitalization for displayed titles 30 Reserved characters 31 Stylized Typography? 32 B-sides

[edit] Bands with a side project

Sometimes bands have a side project. For example, XTC recorded two albums as The Dukes of the Stratosphear. Should this appear on their own page, on the XTC page, or both? Intelligence3 19:09, 25 July 2007 (EDT)

I'd say that you could add a note about the side project on the XTC page (at least under the "Related artists" heading), and have the other albums on their own pages. --MiSP 17:08, 4 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Collaboration with MusicBrainz, please?

There seems to be some effort to include discographies and exact copyrights for each song in LyricWiki. Please do not do it! Instead, there should be a track link or maybe several links to Musicbrainz! This way, all the necessary information can be extracted from Musicbrainz, including Amazon links, last.fm links and so on. Likewise, there is a better place for album covers and music clips are better off at last.fm or even YouTube. Do not duplicate the effort, if Musicbrainz is missing info, include it there and concentrate on creating a better LyricWiki here. Thanks. 85.179.221.17 16:31, 28 May 2007 (EDT)

The comment above is mine, haven't registered just then Pronik 16:45, 28 May 2007 (EDT)

I agree. Do not duplicate the efforts of other projects, instead link to them. Ideally song lyrics would be tagged with the song PUID (the musicbrainz identifier). This will be especially important if timestamped lyrics become more popular so the correct lyrics are associated with the correct version of the song. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 72.44.15.170 (talk • contribs) .

[edit] "Strong Language"

Sorry for bringing this up if it has been before, but in the help section and on the parental advisery template (Template:Parental Advisory) the definition of "Strong Language" doesn't exist. What words denote strong language (does damn constitute strong language? does repetition?)? Is gore something that should be under parental advisery as well? "Depictions" is clear enough for everything else, but those two things aren't there. Violence doesn't denote "gore." People can describe images that aren't violent but simply morbid (i.e. rotting corpses, people bleeding to death or something along those lines). --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 02:17, 6 June 2007 (EDT)

You can just use {{Pa}} without argument, it will use the default option, which is

Explicit lyrics (a.k.a. profanity...)

In the first argument, you can always enter another text string, e.g. {{Pa|Strong language}}. We don't flag pages very often, as many songs nowadays contain some words like damn and shit, but if there are multiple occurrences (enough to be disturbing) you can flag the page using either of the above options.

You can always then use the {{Parental Advisory}} template to shift the actual lyrics down on the page, if you want.

Hope that helps --Mischko <img src="/images/3/31/Talkicon.png" alt="Talk to me" /> <img src="/images/1/1e/EsperanzaIcon.png" alt="Esperanza Member" /> 14:09, 6 June 2007 (EDT)

Just wondering - what about the word fuck, which is becoming more and more used? Should every song with this word be marked with explicit lyrics? --MiSP 06:59, 7 October 2007 (EDT)

Then we can go around and tag a lot of songs on the site. On the other hand, something can be said in favor. Perhaps we can make two templates, PG and R, to replace the current one. The former to be used on pages with e.g. fuck occurring once or twice, R for heavier abuse of language or depictions of sex, violence, etc. Though this is an American system, I think it is sufficiently generally known to be useful. It would be a good task for a bot to go and auto-tag pages, while one or several people would go over the currently tagged pages to replace the rating. --Mischko <img src="/images/3/31/Talkicon.png" alt="Talk to me" /> <img src="/images/1/1e/EsperanzaIcon.png" alt="Esperanza Member" /> 04:38, 15 October 2007 (EDT)

Little behind the times on replying, but wanted to make a point that might help clarify things a bit. Our {{pa}} template is exactly what it says it is—an advisory. You're not trying to decide what is decent or indecent for someone else, you're simply warning them that they might be offended by language or themes in the marked page. Whether they choose to continue viewing the particular article after seeing that warning is entirely up to them.

As such, I think we should apply these as freely as we see fit, and not be too concerned about reaction to them. To me, a {{pa}} is just a "friendly heads-up" about what's to follow, and nobody should get criticized for slapping one on if they feel the need. Done in good faith, it's nothing more than our users being considerate folks.

—  jF 03:20, 11 January 2008 (EST)

Exactly, it is just a heads-up that you may not like what follows. We don't want to censor or judge or rate anything here, that's not what this site is. This is provided as a courtesy to those who don't want those types of language.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 12:37, 11 January 2008 (EST)

[edit] Same album, different countries & track listings

Hi, I'm going to be working on the Saint Etienne-related pages. I have been working on making the list of albums for the artist page, and I'm not sure what to do in cases where the same album was released in different countries, sometimes with different track listings and sometimes even in different years. I figure I could use multiple album templates in the album page itself if the wiki allows that, but I'm not sure how I should list the albums in the artist page to reflect the differences without it getting cluttered.

For the Saint Etienne pages I'll just list the UK releases (they are based in the UK) and await advice from the administrators, for now. Thanks. - Carolyn81 14:56, 27 June 2007 (EDT)

Try to find out what the base album is, then add the additional tracks at the bottom like on Kamelot:Karma (2001). --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 23:38, 29 June 2007 (EDT)

Another way is to see at what I've done at the Mike Oldfield album Islands - just use sub-headings, like you would on a multiple-disc album. =) --MiSP 06:39, 7 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Timestamping Lyrics

some players can read .lrc lyrics if they're correctly timestamped (meaning each line begins with a XX:XX:XX time stamp). i think lyricwiki would be the perfect place to start a crowdsourcing project to timestamp lyrics. may i start doing so? should i start a "wikiproject" to do so? is there anyway the wiki could pe upgraded to show/hide timestamps so we can hide them when we find them annoying? capi ^talk 18:35, 16 July 2007 (EDT)

We would love it if you did so. This is the kind of project that wikis like this excel at. We actually already have a template to handle this {{Lrc}}, although I think it may need a little tweaking to allow it to be in a wiki page instead of an uploaded file. If you wouldn't mind writing up a help page and possibly getting together a basic project page, I think there would be plenty of people that would be willing to help (although maybe not at first).

It is excellent that you are willing to help and I look forward to working with you on this. And if you can, bring your friends :D

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 18:43, 16 July 2007 (EDT)

Well, i think since it's easier than editting wikimedia program for a new "LRC" tab, i will place it on ARTIST:SONG:LRC, that way it is kept under a pattern, and thus each song version gets its own LRC (which was a problem with uploading LRC files, as i saw in the {{Lrc}} archives). OK?

Now, for the project, is there a template i can use for creating a new project? and how do i create a new template to mark each lyric page that there should be (or already is) a LRC page for it? I think it should be two bottom-templates: one to ask people to add timestamps, and another one to tell them there already is. (i know you can create them, but i wanted to learn how to create them myself)

Finally, what program do you use to add timestamps? i use a plugin for winamp, but only in my parents house, since at home i run linux. what should i use?

capi ^talk 11:32, 17 July 2007 (EDT)

For the templates, if you can, modify {{Lrc}} to behave the way you want, i.e. link to a sub-page Artist:Title/lrc. It is better to have a / than a : separating the 'lrc' from the root pagename as MediaWiki will make backlinks automatically.

For requesting timestamps, have a look at the code for {{RequestKanji}} and {{Banner}} for an example of what to do and put the template under something like Template:RequestLrc. Make sure that the request template puts the page under a category so that all songs with pending requests can be found.

An issue with this I thought of is that one song may have several versions or remixes with different timings. However we do {{Lrc}} it will have to support having more than one on a page.

I don't use any program to add timestamps, but when I start, I would probably use audacity to find the offsets in the song; just import the song in and play through it a few times. (I single boot Kubuntu).

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 19:26, 17 July 2007 (EDT)

I like the idea, but I see a few problems regarding standardizing this: What is "correct" timestamps?

• Should the line begin exactly when it begins singing, or a fraction of second earlier? (I like the latter, it looks more "correct" when viewed IMHO - but that's only, as said, IMHO.)
• How do we deal with lyrics where the original text is just a single block, like Theatre of Tragedy's ...A Distance There Is...? There's quite a few long breaks in the song where having a highlighted line would look rather weird. Should an empty line be added there so the lyric highlighting can "rest" there until the lyrics begin again?
• If so: How long should it be between two lines before adding an empty rest-line in between is applicable?
• How does one know that the timestamps are correct? Many of the songs you download on the net is not accurately ripped, and may well be off by over half a second compared to the original (e.g. CD).

I'm not complaining or saying it is a bad idea (I'm rather for it, actually), but we need to think about some things before we act. Also, software should be build and implemented into this site that can automatically create offsets for the user - this would solve the last point above, and possibly also the first (the timestamps can be synced exactly with the music, and the user - e.g. me - can then add an offset of a fraction of a second before downloading). Any thoughts? --MiSP 06:54, 7 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Painful edit mode

It is utterly painful to enter every single album / song name twice. Since the script knows on which band page we are, it could add the band name automatically.

I want to enter this:

== Album Name (2007) ==
# This Is A Song Name

Not this. (This step only happens in the background.)

== [[Bandname:Album Name_(2007)|Album Name (2007)]] ==
#'''[[Bandname:This Is A Song Name|This Is A Song Name]]'''

Technically, isn't it possible to implement this?

Ultinate 15:53, 20 September 2007 (EDT)

The following answer was moved from the Talk:Main Page, where the question was also placed. (I have since deleted it, as the question is more appropriate here.)

I don't know about the technical part, (I'll leave that to Sean) but each section that is typed in has a purpose. (Although, when first entering the information, the part after the pipe "|" can be left blank and a duplicate of the part after the colon will automatically be placed there. If there are parentheses involved, however, there's a glitch and so album titles, for example, have to be entered twice. Underlines are unnecessary, as well.) The part after the pipe is what the link displays. So while the site policy is to capitalize each word, the display on the page can have whatever capitalization is applicable to the album or song.

Entering the artist is important for albums with multiple artists, such as soundtracks, compilations, etc. It's true, 99% of the time the artist in the song matches the artist whose page is being edited, but the automatic form for the album pages has been made to input that info for you. So does the automatic form for the artist pages when a new artist is started. That doesn't help when the artist already exists, of course, but I generally just cut-and-paste another (short-titled) song link and delete the song title and cut-and-paste the new generic link as many times as is needed. Cut-and-paste is your friend!

Also, other subtitles and notes and such can be placed on the page which could follow the basic format that you mentioned. (The "Other Song" sections on many if not most pages, for example.) Implementing such an automatic change would require creating some way to tell the program/script that you didn't want the automatic change to take place.

Unfortunately, any creation of a web page with more than a certain number of variables requires a certain amount of hardship and typing repetition. That's why I know that Sean appreciates all the editing and contributions that everyone does to keep LyricWiki improving and becoming more accurate and comprehensive. The wiki style and learning editing shortcuts just takes a bit of time is all. I hope this is partly helpful in explanation. --Kiefer <img src="/images/5/58/KieferE.jpg" alt="Esperanza" /> <img src="/images/f/f9/KieferTalk.jpg" alt="Talk!" /> 18:07, 20 September 2007 (EDT)

Like Kiefer said, I definitely appreciate everyone's hard work. I too get annoyed of that format, and that is a really good idea to have some short-hand in there. I'll look into that some more.

In the mean-time, I've created a tool similar to one that User:Lentando used to have running, that will help make track listings based on just typing, or on pasting from other sites (wikipedia, amazon, etc.). So, here is the tool to wikify album listings. I tweak it on and off, and hopefully it will be able to auto-detect formats soon.

Let me know if you have any suggestions for it.

-Sean Colombo 11:23, 25 September 2007 (EDT)

As an additional note, I think the album wikifier should be linked to from somewhere else. I haven't had any bug reports or feature requests which probably means that no one is using it. Do we have an appropriate help page with tips for advanced/expert editors?

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 19:40, 20 November 2007 (EST)

[edit] sorting...

is there anywhere (already) an explanation about the sorting : why is david bowie not under B ? thanks in advance Krn02 09:04, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

Because the artist's page is filed under "David Bowie" and not "Bowie, David". This has to do with the pagenaming policy, shown at LW:PN. Just using the (literally) straight-forward approach keeps things as simple and least-confusing as possible. This is helpful with the multi-national nature of the site's visitors, contributors, and content. Floyd, Pink, anyone? :- ] --Kiefer <img src="/images/5/58/KieferE.jpg" alt="Esperanza" /> <img src="/images/f/f9/KieferTalk.jpg" alt="Talk!" /> 09:27, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

thanks + making Patricia Kaas at the moment, i understood the thing Krn02 10:13, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] song on diff'rent albums

is it possible to name two or more albums in the {{Song|Album|Artist}} stuff?!? (like original album + live + ...) Krn02 10:13, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

Just do two Song templates, with a <br/> after all but the last album. --Kiefer <img src="/images/5/58/KieferE.jpg" alt="Esperanza" /> <img src="/images/f/f9/KieferTalk.jpg" alt="Talk!" /> 10:18, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

ok thx Krn02 10:31, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] please speed deletion

where can i ask for some speed deletion?

thanks to delete "Patricia Kaas:Entrer dans la lumiere" : we have to keep "Patricia Kaas:Entrer Dans La Lumière" (capital+accent)(but there is a circle in the links... Krn02 14:55, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

I've fixed the problem, see Patricia Kaas:Entrer Dans La Lumière. For deletion of a page just put {{Deletion}} on the page, or if you need it speddied you could try to contact an admin.. --WillMak050389 16:58, 6 October 2007 (EDT)

thanks Krn02 03:09, 7 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] <lyric> or <lyrics>?

I've seen both <lyric> and <lyrics> being used here. What's the correct one? (Mentioning it, I've seen a lot of inconsistency in templates around the page...) --MiSP 07:14, 7 October 2007 (EDT)

Both are the same code, so it does not matter which is used on a page. The only thing that must be followed: the closing code must be the same as the initial code. For example </lyric> can not be used to terminate <lyrics> and vice versa. To the best of my knowledge, there is no "correct" one to use. Hope that helps. --WillMak050389 11:30, 7 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] live albums

what's the policy over here about live albums?! simply put them in the chronology? in another section? Krn02 03:32, 8 October 2007 (EDT)

There isn't a policy right now, but I would just add them in like a normal album.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 13:08, 8 October 2007 (EDT)

thanks : that's what i did for Patricia Kaas till further notice Krn02 16:14, 8 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Demographics and Translations

Hello, all.

I'm willing to contribute with translations (Portuguese/English) to the project and I was looking forward to make it more useful to the visitors. I'd like to know if there is any demographic research in LyricWiki, so I could translate the most seen Portuguese pages first, and not just translate them at random.

Any hints? Any other portuguese-speakers?
from BRazil here.

(Msbrowntoyou 16:22, 8 October 2007 (EDT))

There is none that I currently know of (Sean may have a better idea of what information is kept as he's the site owner and has access to the servers). Part of the problem will be that a lot of the Portuguese lyrics will not be marked as such, though you can find a list of the ones that are here.

If there is anything else that I can help with, please let me (or one of the other admins know. We are more than willing to help out.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 16:36, 8 October 2007 (EDT)

thank you for the reply, Teknomunk.
I'll see what I can do.
(Msbrowntoyou 18:11, 8 October 2007 (EDT))

We don't have a Portuguese Main Page. A tiny version of the flag of Portugal might be a nice addition! --Kiefer <img src="/images/5/58/KieferE.jpg" alt="Esperanza" /> <img src="/images/f/f9/KieferTalk.jpg" alt="Talk!" /> 18:24, 8 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Links to other Websites

Hello,

it's me again :-)
I'd like to know what are LyricWiki policies about linking/referencing other pages than LyricWiki's in Lyrics pages.

I explain:
There are some lyrics I'm trying to translate that do several reference to brazilian culture (TV programs, artists). I'd like to link those untranslatable stuff to WikiPedia articles, but I don't know how it should be done.

Is it possible?
(Msbrowntoyou 19:51, 8 October 2007 (EDT))

I know how that goes (I do some translations of Japanese things, talk about difficult to translate :P ) I don't think that there is any policies about external links, so use your best judgement in linking. When you are done, drop me a link to the page on my talk page (I'm curious :D )

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 21:28, 8 October 2007 (EDT)

As for the "how it should be done" part, check out the Cheatsheet for information on how to create an external link (and a few other interesting things as well). --Kiefer <img src="/images/5/58/KieferE.jpg" alt="Esperanza" /> <img src="/images/f/f9/KieferTalk.jpg" alt="Talk!" /> 21:38, 8 October 2007 (EDT)

However, I wouldn't recommend adding links inside the <lyrics> tag. Various applications can use LyricWiki's API to extract the lyrics, and we wouldn't want them getting lots of links too. ;) --MiSP 10:28, 9 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] English translations of song titles

"MsBrowntoyou, why don't you ask everything at once and stop creating multiple topics??"
Here I am again.

Question: I couldn't find a way to translate the Portuguese titles in English, so I looked how you were doing it with other languages.
I found a example in the Japanese lyrics ( {{JaTitle|Japanese=雨、削ぎ落とされた感覚|Romanization=Ame, Sogiotosareta Kankaku}} ) and thought I could use something like that to indicate the English meanings.

I tried to adapt it (would look like {{PtTitle|Portuguese=Negligência Social|Translation=Social Negligency}} , in this page ), but it didn't work. It indicates "Template:PtTitle" in a red link and not the text I was waiting.

Hints?
(Msbrowntoyou 11:51, 9 October 2007 (EDT))

First you have to create the template at "Template:PtTitle". I'll give it a shot right now. --WillMak050389 11:55, 9 October 2007 (EDT)

Looks like it should work now: {{PtTitle|Portuguese=Negligência Social|Translation=Social Negligency}} gives:

The Portuguese title of this song is Negligência Social. The English equivalent is Social Negligency.

--WillMak050389 12:04, 9 October 2007 (EDT)

Thanks, WillMak050389!
(Msbrowntoyou 16:07, 9 October 2007 (EDT))

[edit] Automate redundant track listings

Hello. I've noticed that track listings are manually duplicated between the album pages and the artists' pages, but I think there are easier ways to do this. The English Wikisource developed the Labeled Section Transclusion extension for this purpose, or we could place <onlyinclude></onlyinclude> around the track listings on the album pages (if that is supported in this version of MediaWiki). In either case, we'd then replace the duplicate track listing on the artists' talk pages with transclusion calls; for example:

==[[Les Cowboys Fringants:Attache Ta Tuque! (2003)|Attache Ta Tuque! (2003)]]==
{{Les Cowboys Fringants:Attache Ta Tuque! (2003)}}

Even most of that could be further automated by a template, so the entire album listing on the artist page would look like this:

{{list album|12 Grande Chansons (2001)}}
{{list album|Motel Capri (2001)}}
{{list album|Sur Mon Canapé (2001)}}
{{list album|Break Syndical (2002)}}
{{list album|Attache Ta Tuque! (2003)}}
{{list album|La Grand-Messe (2004)}}

What do you think of doing something like this? —Pathoschild 08:15, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

I implemented it on Les Cowboys Fringants. —Pathoschild 15:57, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

On the one hand, that is definitely very cool since it makes us only have to maintain the listings once. However, most users come directly to the artist page, and might be extremely confused if they noticed something wrong and clicked "edit" and didn't see the songs at all. (This also breaks a whole bunch of bot and API things... but those could be fixed to work with the transclusion stuff).

I think the hardest part of getting people to contribute to a wiki is keeping them from being afraid to edit or intimidated by the syntax.

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

-Sean Colombo 12:03, 15 October 2007 (EDT)

I think that that is pretty good reasoning. I understand the desire to not have to duplicate things from Artist to Album page, for sure. The tendency for errors to get corrected on the Artist page and remain on the Album page is certainly an issue. But the wiki language and syntax certainly isn't easy to pick up for all people. Adding templates into the mix is an added barrier at times for editing. In this case, the template information wouldn't be edited to make a correction, but the page to which the template refers to would be. It would take someone fairly familiar with wikis to decipher that.

As for the tendency for Album pages to differ from Artist pages, it would be nice to be able to automatically check an artist's page to the album pages that link to it to see what differences there may be. --Kiefer <img src="/images/5/58/KieferE.jpg" alt="Esperanza" /> <img src="/images/f/f9/KieferTalk.jpg" alt="Talk!" /> 12:49, 15 October 2007 (EDT)

The template could fake the header with an edit link, so clicking "edit" would bring the user to the edit view for the album page, but that would break the automatic table of contents. I'm not entirely sure how we could maintain simplicity without redundancy; maybe bots could keep album and artist pages synchronized, but that would probably be difficult. —Pathoschild 19:45, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

I understand that there are two sides of this matter, and I have yet to make up my mind. However, I'm mostly for implementing this, because differences between artist and album pages is an actual (and possibly huge) problem. It's very tedious, though necessary as of now, going through every album page to check whether the tracklisting is identical to that of the artist page. On another note: Remember including album art in the template - you need to extract the "cover" part of the Album template. --MiSP 16:05, 15 October 2007 (EDT)

If we install the Labeled Section Transclusion extension, we can do the opposite: have the lists on the artist pages, and transclude them on the album pages. That would be less confusing, because the automatic edit link on the album page would show an HTML comment in the section explaining how to edit the track list (instead of the template code). Users editing the list from the artist page probably wouldn't even notice the difference. —Pathoschild 03:52, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Image Categories

I believe having image categories for album art would help - organizing them in various ways for easy access and location. Making them mandatory would be a good idea as well. For classification, instead of piling them all into one giant category we could do genres or even sub genres (which would get messy because some artists are hard to classify). Anyways, a normal album cover art would end up with categories such as Category:Metal images and Category:BANDNAME images. The second type of category would only be necessary if the band had a certain amount of albums and art on the site (maybe 3 would be a good minimum?). --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 23:20, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

I think it would be better to categorize all such images to "Category:Band name", which would then be categorized to the relevant alphabetical, genre, et cetera categories. It's difficult to wait until three images are uploaded before creating the category, because it would require checking how many images have been uploaded for that band every time a user uploads something. Another drawback to limiting categories to bands with several images is that the categories become a confusing mix of images and subcategories, which makes navigation difficult; for example, 3477525m.jpg (an album cover for Fightstar) would be categorized under "I" based on the namespace or "3" based on the file name, rather than "F" based on the band name. —Pathoschild 15:30, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm a little uncertain what the benefits of categorizing images would be. Could you elaborate? --Kiefer <img src="/images/5/58/KieferE.jpg" alt="Esperanza" /> <img src="/images/f/f9/KieferTalk.jpg" alt="Talk!" /> 12:54, 15 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Discogs links

It's great that Discogs links are included in the artist's page. There's only one problem. In the bands that have "The" as part of the name, Discogs likes it put at the end. So "The Clash" becomes "Clash, The". It's there a way to edit the Discogs link so that it can be properly linked? Thanks =] --Djproject 23:58, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Album Navigation

I think template song or song footer should be modified to allow up to two optional links for navigation within an album. That way people can just click once to get to the next or previous song on the album without having to go back to either the album page or the artist page. Template song would be a better choice because people would see it immediately rather than having to go to the bottom of the page. However, if we did it on both it would be even better, although redundant (providing links in both locations for ease of use). For template song, we could just place a line underneath where it normally places text. Perhaps something like StrategyWiki's footer nav? For example this page has two links at the bottom, with little arrows to denote previous and next pages. --Notmyhandle (talk • contribs) 20:10, 22 October 2007 (EDT)

I'm all for that. =) --MiSP 17:58, 23 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Trying out new search functionality

As we all know, the search bar on this site has always been pretty weak. I get asked to fix it almost every week. I could try to hook a fully indexed search-engine into it (something like Lucene) if this doesn't work, but I figured I'd try out a simple Google Site Search first to see if they do any better than the default MediaWiki search (I have a feeling they do... that's their job :)).

If you have any particularly good/bad experiences with the new search, please let me know.
-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 23:09, 31 October 2007 (EDT) (special thanks to the Game Programming Wiki for the inspiration).

I love Google, I really do. But why replace a Wiki search bar with Google's? I wouldn't be complaining except that now, as far as I know, it is impossible to create pages with Japanese page names. Simply entering the text into my browser's URL bar doesn't work, because the parser interprets it incorrectly. The way to do this before was to search for the page you are trying to create, and then click the 'create this page' link that appeared in the results page. A workaround would be nice, but I just can't see why the searching was even changed. In all the Wiki's I have worked with, I have never had a problem with the search interface. Furthermore, searching through Google was already possible. ~ Wind Owl 23:49, 31 October 2007 (EDT) (Copied from Main Page talk)

EDIT: Apparently the FireFox Search Plugin provided in the sidebar is a functional workaround, but I still think the idea of using Google search technology on a Wiki is silly. ~ Wind Owl

I second WO completely. This Google search stinks and the build in wiki search is fine. Sean, what complaint were there about the built-in search? Maybe it was just a matter of changing the default search namespaces? -- Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 01:59, 1 November 2007 (EDT)

It bugs me too, I think way too many sites are succumbing to Google's difficult to turn down overly wealthy empire. I mean they even keep permanent records of your searches. But yeah now it's very hard to make a page in a different language that uses different texts. GMSuerte 01:08, 1 February 2008 (EST)

With regards to Lucene, the LuceneSearch extension is what the Wikimedia Foundation's wikis use. —Pathoschild 18:29, 01 November 2007 (UTC)

Hi guys, thanks for the feedback. I was un-aware that it would make it annoying to make Japanese pages... youch.

The compliants I heard were from normal users (the kind that look for lyrics instead of add them)... If you search for the lyrics from a song, or if you know just a song name (or part of it) and not the artist, the matching was generally very bad. This didn't really bother me because I knew that I coul just type "Artist Name:Song Name" and get right to a song I was looking for. But since I'm making the pages, not looking for lyrics, I was never searching by part of a sentence, just pages I knew the names of (and I knew to put a colon in there instead of typing "Schism by Tool" because I'm here all the time).

That Lucene plugin sounds like a brilliant fix to all three of the problems (foreign pages, no jump-to-page, and bad search results for new users). I'll look into that as soon as I can (my backlog is a painful at the moment... but I'm planning to get a ton done today. See my userpage for the stuff that has to get done first).

Thanks for all of the feedback & tips guys!

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 12:08, 4 November 2007 (EST)

Excellent, thank you. ~ Wind Owl 12:11, 4 November 2007 (EST)

[edit] Spam

We are receiving a lot of spam lately. I will block users who vandalized more than 10 pages indefinitely without warning, because they're probably proxys / socket puppets anyway. But perhaps we should consider (temporarily) disabling anonymous edits, though it is really against the anyone-can-edit philosophy of a Wiki. But I just reverted and blocked two people this morning alone. To everyone, if you revert spam by an anonymous user, please check their contributions as well (click on the IP address in the history) and check everything. --Mischko <img src="/images/3/31/Talkicon.png" alt="Talk to me" /> <img src="/images/1/1e/EsperanzaIcon.png" alt="Esperanza Member" /> 04:30, 1 November 2007 (EDT)

I just fixed several spams. What do I do to let y'all know that such-and-such IP belongs to a zombie? --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 05:16, 1 November 2007 (EDT)

@Aquatiki: Just leave a message on an admin's talk page. Thanks!

@Mischko et. al: Thanks for your diligence cleaning that junk up! Last night, Teknomunk and I found a potential fix for this problem. I'm trying to get all caught up with everything today, so I'm hoping to have the fix in by sometime tonight (see my short-term todo list).

[edit] Creation of Genre "Queercore"

Hello,

I'd like to know if it is possible to create a Genre to bring all the "Queercore" artists together.

In Wikipedia's words (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queercore): "As a musical genre, it may be distinguished by lyrics exploring themes of prejudice and dealing with issues such as sexual identity, gender identity and the rights of the individual; more generally bands offer a critique of society endemic to their position within it, sometimes in a light-hearted way, sometimes seriously." (Msbrowntoyou 10:39, 5 November 2007 (EST))

Sure. Any recognized musical genre can be created as a Category.    Kiefer    talk    contribs    admin   15:57, 5 November 2007 (EST)

Gotta throw in my two cents on this one.  ;-) Read further in that Wikipedia article, and you find a comment that "Queercore groups encompass many genres such as hardcore punk, synthpunk, indie rock, power pop, no wave, noise, experimental, industrial and others". I find that establishing Queercore as a musical genre is iffy at best.

To me, a musical genre is determined by the music, and quite individually. As pointed out elsewhere on Wikipedia, Led Zeppelin's music falls into such diverse genres as "heavy metal, hard rock, classic rock, folk, or blues". It all depends on which particular song you are talking about.

To consider Queercore (and similar "art movements") a musical genre, you are essentially taking the music out of the equation. It would be just as easy to establish a genre related to pro-choice commentary, which would include such diverse—and quite unrelated—songs as Loretta Lynn's "The Pill" and Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach".

Personally, I find the "base denominators" a more workable method of defining music. I find it a bit silly trying to label things as "soft rock", "hard rock", "classic rock", "alternative rock", etcetera, when they all fall under the heading of rock and share similar roots and influences. I only differentiate when a significant and unique musical character can be defined. (Such as heavy metal, which can be characterized by heavy amplification and distortion, a focus on bass/drums/guitar, "loud and harsh" vocals, and other criteria.)

I think it would be better to identify the individual work by the music, rather than seek to address the theme involved. Otherwise you risk a precedent of grouping unrelated music together. I love that Dolly Parton country cover of "Shine", but I hardly think it belongs next to the Collective Soul original...  ;-)

—  jF 22:47, 7 January 2008 (EST)

[edit] Backing Tracks

This is great for Lyrics but is there somewhere on the internet where we can get good backing tracks for free? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 170.220.2.13 (talk • contribs) .

[edit] "Too many connections"

I get the error Too many connections all the time. Can anything be done about this, e.g. upgrading the server or whatever? --MiSP 17:28, 15 November 2007 (EST)

Thanks for the info. Although we didn't respond back when this was happening (I was scurrying to fix it), it was definitely helpful to know when this was happening, so thank you for letting us know!

Our situation has calmed down and I think we've been running without a hitch for a few weeks now.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 00:44, 14 December 2007 (EST)

[edit] Proposed new Main page layout

I've gotten feedback a number of times from users who are new to the site and are a bit confused. I love the way the main page looks though, so I just took the feedback and created a layout that has the items in different locations (Song Of The Day and Album Of The Day are now near each other since they're very similar in what they do), and added a search bar that would be visible to new users (since they might not know to scroll to the bar on the side of the page). These are just small tweaks, but I think it might make first-time-visitors a little more comfortable. I also think SOTD was in a box by itself just as legacy code from when I put it in a box when there was almost nothing else on the page (oops).

If anyone has an opinion, please leave it on the layout's talk page (I'll wait a day or two just to make sure everyone interested gets a chance to see it).
Here is the experimental version of the tweaked layout.

Thanks for the input!
-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 00:50, 14 December 2007 (EST)

Looks good. I suppose the features that doesn't work there (like the main menu and the Editor's Corner) will work once it's put at the main page. By the way, wouldn't Editors' corner, i.e. plural, fit better? --MiSP 04:18, 15 December 2007 (EST)

Yup, the broken parts were temporary (had to do mostly with where it was located). That's a good point about the Editors' Corner. I'll change that.

I've only gotten positive feedback about the new layout, so I've put it up now. I'm going to change UberBot so that he works with the new Song Of The Day layout, but everyone may want to keep an eye on that in case I mess up.

Thanks for the feedback everyone (here and on the layout's talk page),

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 00:56, 21 December 2007 (EST)

[edit] Putting same language together

Hey there, there exist the categories "Language/de", "Language/German", "Language/german" "Language/deutsch" and "Language/Deutsch". It would be better, if there would be an feature which changes "language/de" and "language/deutsch" automatically into "Language/German".--91.89.182.110 09:27, 20 December 2007 (EST)

Hi, I’ve cleaned up these categories. --HS·☏·✎ 09:56, 5 January 2008 (EST)

What about missing languages? Like Old English, Middle English, Medieval French etc.? The Mediæval Bæbes have a lot of those and I don't think it would be correct to have them in english, french etc. --MetalSnake 10:51, 5 January 2008 (EST)

If you go to Special:Categories, it gives a list of every category that has a page attached. The languages that you mentioned probably have not been categorized yet (yes, categories can have a category). Just for language pages, make sure and put a category sort key on the category link, i.e. [[Category:Language|Middle English]]

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 14:57, 5 January 2008 (EST)

[edit] Too Many Connections

Ive started getting the "too many connections" error...(Nexus 01:59, 28 December 2007 (EST))

[edit] AOTW nominations

Is it possible to nominate compilation albums? I've read the nomination guidelines, and while there's nothing in there that says you can, there's also nothing that says you can't. Thanks. - Cubs Fan2007 04:02, 5 January 2008 (EST)

Please do so! Unless it is specifically forbidden, or required, we are very liberal about what can be done here.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 04:19, 5 January 2008 (EST)

Great, thanks. It's just I did, but them someone removed it, which kind of irked me. - Cubs Fan2007 12:02, 5 January 2008 (EST)

[edit] Should Non-English Translations be kept?

Hi. The hard-working ÜberBot has collected some non-English translations of Rammstein songs. See e.g. the Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, or the Swedish version of Rammstein:Sonne. I’m tempted to just delete them because

1. I can’t check them for correctness or even fix their accents
2. I don’t think it makes sense to keep translations in one language (like Swedish) for only very few songs
3. it would be hopeless to try to collect translations in many languages generally
4. they were not created by our users

On the other hand, you could say that we should keep the stuff that we already have. So what do you think? Dump them, keep them, or should those editing on the Rammstein pages discuss under themselves? --HS·☏·✎ 10:16, 5 January 2008 (EST)

I think it's quite senseless to have translations into languages other than english. I think everyone here speaks english so those aren't really needed and it's very hard to translate lyrics so everyone should work on just one translation (english) to improve that one instead of having dozens of translated lyrics which are mostly translations from the english translations and therefore even more incorrect than the english one. --MetalSnake 10:50, 5 January 2008 (EST)

I would have to disagree with MetalSnake on this one in that I think that translations into any language should be accepted. However, HS.4 may be reason enough to delete them.

HS.1 will not be a problem as we get more users here, a wider variety of languages will come, so I don't really see that as a problem. When I first came here, the Japanese songs here were a joke, but not any more.

And about HS.3, we are trying to collect the lyrics for every song ever created, doesn't that seem a little hopeless to you? And yet we are trying anyway.

I think we need a few more opinions before any policy is decided on this one, so those people who are watching this page, what do you think?

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 14:58, 5 January 2008 (EST)

I would have to agree with teknomunk, just because almost all of the users right now are English speaking, we are striving to be a more universal site. These translations are just as helpful as English translations for non-English songs. That being said, I think we need to either find official translations or at least note the ones that are unofficial as such. I think that if we delete non-English translations of songs, we might as well delete non-English songs altogether, its the same concept. That's just my two cents, take it for what it's worth. --WillMak050389 15:09, 5 January 2008 (EST)

In my opinion, lyrics should be kept in the language they are sung in. So German lyrics in German, English lyrics in English, etc. Of course, there may be cases where songs are actually released in multiple languages, then it is certainly justified to have the lyrics in that language as well. The only exception to not having translations would be to have an English translation as secondary translation on the page, just because this site was originally in English, most users speak English and English is one of the most widely used languages on the web -- therefore having an English translation will make the meaning of the lyrics more accessible to people who are unable to read the original ones. But instead of collecting lyrics in all different translations in which the song is not even available, I'd rather focus our attentions on cleaning up the thousands of pages that still need attention, as well as improving the site (layout, copyrights, etc) and keeping the lyric database up to date (so many songs have to be released each day, and a lot of them appear here fairly quickly already). Just my 2 cents... --Mischko <img src="/images/3/31/Talkicon.png" alt="Talk to me" /> <img src="/images/1/1e/EsperanzaIcon.png" alt="Esperanza Member" /> 10:03, 7 January 2008 (EST)

I'm with Mischko. Lyrics are every bit as significant to a song as the music, and so much gets lost in translation. (Those of us that were lucky enough—no pun intended—to hear "Suerte" first can't stand to hear that horrible "Whenever, Wherever". Those beautiful Spanish lyrics are what make the song shine.)

As Mischko said, an exception should be made when the song is actually released in more than one language, such as the aforementioned "Suerte". However—while I agree that this is an English site, and caters primarily to English-speaking people, I don't necessarily think that translations should be provided for every foreign song, be it for us English people or any other language. As I said, part of the artform of a song is the lyrics, I find translating a song into a second language (when the artist has chosen not to themselves) to be a bit insulting to the artist's work. It would be like repainting the Mona Lisa because you're not familiar with the clothing she's wearing...

About the only "but" I would throw in would be for songs in non-Arabic alphabets. I'm on the fence on that one, since anything in Japanese is going to be a bunch of ??????????? to anyone without the proper kanji or other typefaces installed. Without those typefaces (and some knowledge in reading those characters), no doubt we are missing out on some masterpieces. That might be worthwhile for an accurate translation, but that's about the only good reason I could personally name.

—  jF 23:10, 7 January 2008 (EST)

I full well know that a lot is lost in translation (I am responsible for a few of the translations of Japanese songs here), but I like translations as a tool to understand the original song (and the language) rather than it being an insult to the artist. It was a major factor in me studying Japanese and I would like to be able to help other do the same.

I know we have thousands of pages that need more work, so we should not go out of our way to encourage translations into additional languages beyond English, but we should also not go out of our way to censor (delete) the translations that already exist.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 02:43, 8 January 2008 (EST)

Everyone out there has great ideas about this, but may I ask why not add a sub-section "Translations" under the "Other Songs" section? Since the bots find songs and automatically put new songs in the "Other Songs" and we've kinda discussed the fact that we shouldn't promote translation production, but be shouldn't delete them, why not put them in a separate sub-section? Then, they would be out of the way of released artist songs and if a user wants to look at them, they could.

I wouldn't think it would be a difficult task to do and would probably solve many problems addressed. HS.1 would have a (accent) template on the page so someone who does know the language would fix it. HS.2 separates the translation from the actual released song (which most users tend to want to do anyway). HS.3 addresses a place where translations would be welcome if needed and lastly, HS.4 if they were not created by our users and are found in the "Other songs", they could either be deleted or moved to the new sub-section.

Also, If we come across a page that has a translation embedded in it, we can split it of into it's own page and add the page into the new section.

What do you all think about this possibility?

Lyricserver 21:26, 10 January 2008 (EST)

I would suggest the other way, that the translations be embedded into the original page, and have one page per song released by an artist. That way you don't have to run around to try and find if a translation exists or not, you can see it in the TOC. And it also keeps the artist page from getting cluttered. Having a section for "translations" and pulling them out of the articles would likely double the length of certain artist pages (for example Ali Project, one of the more popular Japanese artist pages here).

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 00:21, 11 January 2008 (EST)

That might not be so bad, Teknomunk, but how about our notably underused subpage capabilities? I'm envisioning (just for ideas here) a template at the top (like {{translation|German}} or {{translation|French}}) that would create text at the top that says something like "These lyrics also available in German." That could reference a subpage from the article itself to provide the lyrics. It wouldn't be "embedded" in the page as you suggested, but it would seem a logical place to put variations of the same page to me.

For a song called [[Artist:Sample Song]], you would have a page called [[Artist:Sample Song/German]] or [[Artist:Sample Song/French]]. I can see some potential confusion over the page, however—do you use "German" or "Deutsche"? (And my possibly solution for that: if it's called from an English page, use the English name for the other language. If a Chinese translation called from a French page, it would be [[Artist:Sample Song/Chinois]], and so on.)

Here the Wikipedia reference on subpages. Whatcha think—workable idea or not?

—  jF 03:01, 11 January 2008 (EST)

Subpages are already used for songs that were released in several languages by the artist as described on Help:Multiple Languages. See e.g. Rammstein:Du Hast for a song that has both a very literal translation and a more meaningful “official” translation. I like the current line-by-line formatting of the English translations, because it allows you to sing (or read) along to the lyrics and glance at the meaning at the same time. --HS·☏·✎ 17:50, 14 January 2008 (EST)

Now how on earth did I miss that? Looks like someone already had the same good idea.  ;-)

One possible problem with the side-by-side translation, though. Different resolutions are going to freak things out a bit. You might wind up with lines wrapping and throwing off the line-by-line format. And I notice the side-by-side lyric blocks don't always line up vertically depending on resolution.

What would be the solution for situations where the song has been released in more than one language (or more than one translation is available)? How do you decide which appears on the page with the original lyrics? (I can see English getting priority, since LyricWiki caters to a primarily English-speaking audience, but what if English isn't even one of the available translations?)

—  jF 01:46, 15 January 2008 (EST)

[edit] Capitalization for displayed titles

I am copying a discussion from my talk page. We need to discuss this.

When doing AotW yesterday, I edited K.d. Lang:Ingénue (1992) and changed the display names for some song titles by making some prepositions and articles (a, an, the) lowercase. Now, the naming convention for article names is to capitalize each word (LW:PN), but there is no precedent for the displayed titles. --WillMak050389 15:16, 7 January 2008 (EST)

On this week's Album Of The Week, I noticed you corrected the displayed titles to put prepositions in lowercase. Is there a Wikipedia rule involved here, or is that done for the sake of appearance only?

The album gives the tracklist in all capitals, so it's useless as a reference. I've never been one to agree with that old English rule of "lowercase any unimportant words" that typically applies to prepositions in titles, and find the initial capitalization policy of LyricWiki quite agreeable for both article names and displayed titles. (Where no clear conflict exists, of course—with k.d. lang, the rules are all but thrown out the window.)  ;-)

I'd personally argue for keeping initial capitalization for everything, at least until that fabled mod can be applied to enable proper case. New users (and even us not-so-new users) have enough trouble keeping up with LyricWiki standards, and it can be confusing to know that the rule for article names might not necessarily apply for displayed titles.

Since LW:PN doesn't specifically mention displayed titles, I'd like to see some discussion on that point. (As it reads now, the rule applies to article names only.) Perhaps a consensus could be made part of the policy. I'd be comfortable either way, but I would like to see it clarified and standardized for the benefit of us anal types who are striving for perfection.  ;-)

What do you think?

—  jF 02:03, 7 January 2008 (EST)

I would think that the display title should be as close to what appears on the album as possible.

And about that plugin, I ran into a problem with resetting the cache of a page. If you or anyone else knows how to do that or would like to work on it, please let me know.

- teknomunk (talk,E,歌) 02:50, 7 January 2008 (EST)

Personally, the way I have learned that titles for anything, in English, is that prepositions and articles (a, an, the) are to be lowercase unless it is the initial word. I use this rule when displaying the title, but of course, when creating a page it should be all caps for initial characters. I use the lowercase rule, unless of course the band's naming goes against this. (A similar problem occurs between whether to use "and" or "&"). I think this should be discussed, though. So I will post this discussion at the Community Portal. --WillMak050389 15:09, 7 January 2008 (EST)

Actually, I've been doing a little bit of both. When I edited the Moenia pages (TechnoPop group in Spanish), I took to heart LW:PN, however in other Spanish pages I came across, I kept some of the title display properties

(Note: in Spanish, titles are always lowercase except for the first letter of the initial word and any Proper Nouns (ex. La emancipación de Mimi, a translation for Mariah Carey's The Emancipation of Mimi. )

Lyricserver 21:42, 10 January 2008 (EST)

[edit] Reserved characters

Since WillMak050389 mentioned this in a comment above, would anyone like to compile a list of reserved characters for LyricWiki? It should also include any characters that aren't necessarily reserved, but might interfere with LW operations. If someone a bit more knowledgeable with MediaWiki can provide that information, I'll be glad to work on turning it into a replacement list in the Help (along the lines of "+ should be replaced with Plus", "& replaced with And", etcetera). We already have some basic rules for that in LW:PN, but a concise list might be a useful reference.

—  jF 22:17, 11 January 2008 (EST)

[edit] Stylized Typography?

I noticed in the Page name policy it mentions nothing about artists, albums and songs which might have a stylized name, eg. a name where a symbol takes the place of a letter. For example the artist P!nk has an exclamation mark in place of the "i" however LyricWiki has her at Pink. KoЯn is the same, redirecting to KoRn. At wikipedia they have a policy against it however this being a music wiki I'd assume this wouldn't apply here being the policy seems to simply state that the first letter for each word in a page title must be capitalized and the symbols: + # and < be replaced with words however these are all for technically reasons and with the capitalization for consistency as well, however as far as I can tell the stylized names like P!nk and KoЯn don't seem to have technical problems. Also it seems that MusicBrainz considers P!nk to be the correct name, also it seems that a Japanese band and a video game music composer go by the name Pink so simply having a redirect to P!nk wouldn't be the best so if stylized names should be used here then a note should be left at the top of Pink directing to Pink should be done instead. So does anyone have anything to say on this issue? The Light6 07:37, 15 January 2008 (EST)

I would say to ignore it in favor of a reasonable approximation. While something like the famous reversed B in ABBA (which isn't in the Unicode character set) isn't too hard to handle, you run into the problem of dealing with artists that throw all kinds of ridiculous things into their work. Consider Prince's dalliance with that unpronounceable symbol in the 1990's, and you see what I mean.

As a general rule, I would suggest limiting things to strict alphanumeric characters (in other words, the letters of the standard alphabet for the artist's native language—including the appropriate diacritical marks—and the numbers 0 through 9). Going by the established pronunciation might help as well. I mentioned reserved characters in this post, and alphanumerics are inherently safe for use in URL's and article names. Using any other characters (including those that may not be specifically reserved by operating systems or HTTP) could lead to troubles down the road. (Just ask Sean about API's and SOAP and such—I bet you get a rather exasperated response.)  ;-)

Wikipedia's policy is wise. Our own LW:PN might not specifically mention it, but the rationale behind both policies is the same: to provide accuracy and consistency in naming while avoiding anything that might throw a monkey wrench into the works later. As Wikipedia said, a simple redirect from those bizarre typographical treatments to a more standard spelling is a good idea.

Parting comment on MusicBrainz—I note that the majority of the data they collect is from what people are tagging their MP3's with (via their tagger applications). That doesn't make them the most reliable resource of information, and I'd certainly put more faith in Wikipedia's judgement (and the intense scrutiny from their monstrous user base) than MusicBrainz.

—  jF 01:06, 16 January 2008 (EST)

With ABBA, isn't the reversed B a logo design issue, rather than an official part of the band's name? Same, basically with Korn/KoRn. (Wikipedia uses "Korn", but we use "KoRn", primarily, I believe because their website uses the capitalized forward R.) Logo designs aren't necessarily 100% official and sometimes use artistic license with regards to the artist's name. The same thing goes for Pink's name, which Wikipedia notes as sometimes being "stylized" as P!nk. Some artists purposely have symbolic or typographically unusual names, which, like t.A.T.u., should be followed, but this should be distinguished from creatively altered logos, I think.    Kiefer    talk    contribs    admin   02:57, 16 January 2008 (EST)

@ jF: About "other characters (including those that may not be specifically reserved by operating systems or HTTP) could lead to troubles down the road", I'm not sure about the bit about operating systems however for HTTP yes it could cause trouble with external sites trying to link in (at least with BBCode) and links from here out (eg, with the song footer template, for example I know an ampersand (&) breaks links to last.fm) however Non-English artists sometimes have to use characters which are not alphanumeric and any time you go to such a page (without typing or copy and pasting the correct name) it will change the symbols to what I believe is Unicode equivalent.

@ Kiefer: So the policy is basically unless proven that a stylised name is the real/correct name the artist goes by the stylised name is basically just a logo and the non-stylised name should be used?

The Light6 07:34, 16 January 2008 (EST)

Yes, the reversed B is nothing more than artistic license. And as with my beloved Prince, you have to find a balance between what the artist's desires and the rules that make life easier for us here. And that could prove tricky. With KoRn, I would think applying our normal capitalization rules would be appropriate. (And side note—they pay an unexpected homage to ABBA by reversing the R in their band logo. Never noticed that...)

Assume you have a band named CoRe, and the artist chose to capitalize the name as such because it is a portmonteau of the names of two members, Coleman and Redding. I would find justification to capitalize it in that manner given that scenario, since it reflects an origin from two proper names (which would be capitalized themselves). Under that premise, I find that full capitalization of ABBA would be correct, since it's an acronym of the four members' names. However, with KoRn, there is no indication (at least not as far as I've found) that it is anything but a made-up name, assumedly from mispelling the word "corn" and reversing the third letter. Knowing the history of the name in question helps, but I think it ultimately falls down to individual circumstances.

A good contrast is k.d. lang, who is famous for lowercasing her name as a tribute to her favorite poet, e.e. cummings. She has universally applied this treatment to her name since the start of her career, and given the uniformity in her extensive catalog, I would choose to honor that. (I should point out that Wikipedia disagrees with me, and has chosen not to honor it.) But what about Pink? While her releases seem to be fairly consistent on using the exclamation point instead of the I, note the biography page on her official site, which uses both forms. Where the artist uses a regular spelling and a stylized spelling, I would go for using a regular spelling every time.

But again, it is probably impossible to set a universal rule for such. As Kiefer said, some artists purposely break those rules (and sometimes with good reason), and figuring out which artists are doing it for a valid reason and which are doing it just for publicity or image can be tough. Each situation has to be looked at on its own individual merit, I would think.

(Another good artist for discussion purposes is Mike & The Mechanics, who apparently have chosen to abandon the "calculator" logo they used on their first albums. We might see P!nk do that someday...)

Concerning those "not necessarily reserved" characters, I should reiterate my comment about the "artist's native language". We can't complain about Japanese kanji being used, nor should we have issues with words like "Français" and "jalapeño". Such characters are letters, after all, and are being addressed by the Unicode standard. What I'm talking about is using characters that aren't alphanumeric, like ♫ or ∑. We should avoid those, as well as mixing code pages (like trying to create something like KoЯn). They may not map to letters or numbers in different code pages, causing chaos for users in other parts of the world.

And while much lesser of an issue, it also could make our wiki data worthless for other uses. (For example, if Sean ever decided to export our wiki to files, he'd have to name countless files by hand or pick his operating system of choice carefully. The quotation mark, question mark, and asterisk are all reserved characters under NTFS, but none of those are reserved under HFS.)

—  jF 02:10, 17 January 2008 (EST)

[edit] B-sides

I was wondering if there was some edit that would show that the song you're looking at is a B-side. Such as, when I click on a song, at the top it says:

This song is performed by Band Name. and appears on the album Album Title (Year).

But if the song is a B-side and isn't on a album, I was wondering if you could have something like this:

This song is a B-side and appears on the single "Song Name (Year)" by Band Name.

Just wondering. Thanks.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by KirbyMaster14 (talk • contribs) .

You can always recreate the results of the Song template by hand for the relevant article, much as I've been doing with a lot of k.d. lang stuff. (Take a look at the source code for "Constant Craving" to see what I did.)

B-side is a bit of a misnomer these days. While the B side was once used for songs that weren't expected to become hits (or to provide a place for album outtakes), modern artists instead tend to add mixes of the particular song. Most B-sides actually do appear on a work elsewhere, and with the extinction of vinyl media, a true B side for singles no longer exists. I'd suggest instead putting a comment that specifically addresses their absence on another work. Perhaps:

This song was released as a single by Band Name.

This would also serve songs that were released on CD singles as the only track and don't appear elsewhere.

—  jF 23:10, 30 January 2008 (EST)