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Assessments again: automatic bot rating

On 14 March we proposed (successfully) "to commission a bot to automatically give a "Start" rating to nearly all articles which are not already classified as Stub.

This has now been done to about 2,500 articles (with some anomalies still to cleared up). (Articles previously rated as Stub, Good Article, Featured Article or Featured List should be unchanged.)

Two points need to be made:

• Some of the automatic "Start" assessments will inevitably be wrong. If you come across them, they can/should be changed by hand. (The change can be done on the talk page via the 'edit this page' button. You will see a line that says
  {{WikiProject Opera|class=Start|auto=yes}}. You can replace "class=Start" with "class=B", (or class=Stub). The standard ranking is explained here.)
• After the cleanup we will be starting a discussion about where we go next. Participation by all active editors would be most appreciated!

--GuillaumeTell 13:45, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Maybe it's worth adding that if anyone sees any problems/errors they can contact GuillaumeTell or myself, and we'll try to sort it out. --Kleinzach 13:57, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

I already think that Prince Igor should be re-classified. However, as the second biggest contributor to it after User:Ivan Velikii, I don't think it should be me who ups it.

More generally, once some assessment has started, it might be worth identifying operas that are comfortable Bs for nomination for GA-status or as suitable after a bit of work if we have them as part of one of our monthly drives.--Peter cohen (talk) 14:11, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

I've done Prince Igor but this is provisional as no real assessment has started. We are still in the clean up stage after all. --Kleinzach 14:55, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks--Peter cohen (talk) 17:40, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Question. For future articles to which we add {{WikiProject Opera}}, do we manually enter a stub rating (if the article has a stub tag) at the same time, or do we wait for the bot to do it? Voceditenore (talk) 17:56, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, please do. The bot's activities are a one-off and will finish quite soon. Not to worry if you forget to add the rating - the most important thing is to put the banner on the talk page, and then, if there isn't an assessment, Kleinzach or I will hoover it up when it appears in the Unassessed category. --GuillaumeTell 18:08, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

An Inconvenient Truth

I thought some of you might be interested in doing something with this: La Scala has commissioned Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli to produce an opera based on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth

"La Scala to Stage Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, AP, May 29, 2008. Retrieved 29 May 2008.

CH52584 (talk) 17:07, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for reminding us! I think I'll do an article on Giorgio Battistelli. There are ones in both the Italian and German Wikipedias, although (as per usual) both are completely unreferenced. But there's a lot of English language stuff on him. He's quite well-known in the UK. It might even give the highly articulate 'Birtwistle vandals' [1], [2] a new playground.;-) Best, Voceditenore (talk) 17:51, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Victorian burlesques - Help, please!

I notice that the bot is tagging (and we have previously been inconsistent in tagging) Victorian burlesques and related articles (see, e.g., Robert Reece) with the Opera project tag. These works were parodies of opera and other classical stories (e.g., Aladdin and Cinderella), written from the 1860s to about 1890, often set to music ranging from opera and operetta to popular songs of the day, although many of them had original scores by Meyer Lutz (particularly), and other composers like Osmond Carr. For what it is worth, the performers in these pieces were not opera singers but came from music hall and pantomime backgrounds (think Adam Sandler and his parody character, Opera Man). I can see an argument for including these articles in the Opera project, but I think the stronger argument is to place them within the purview of the musical theatre project (WP:MUSICALS). Note also that the musical theatre article states: "Other musical theatre forms developed by the 19th century, such as vaudeville, British music hall, melodrama and burlesque." I created most of these articles over the past two years, but I had not yet solicited opinion on this issue. Can I get a consensus on this, before I change the tags from opera project to musicals project? -- Ssilvers (talk) 16:42, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Looks like this isn't the only problem with the bot run [3]. I'd tell MelonBot - maybe this can be sorted out automatically. --Folantin (talk) 16:52, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

OK, but the question is, should these be tagged with the Opera project tag or the musical theatre project tag? Can you please express an opinion? Thanks! -- Ssilvers (talk) 17:34, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I'd say these would fall under the "pre-history" of the musical, so musical theatre project would be the best option. --Folantin (talk) 17:37, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Can you please just leave this to Kleinzach (who is currently in the Land of Nod) and me (about to go for a much-needed dinner break) for now - see my Talk page for the current dialogue with User:Happy-melon... We are actually getting there, but the gun was jumped before the details had been sorted out. The important point about Hollingshead (etc.) is that he has a G&S cat, and we wanted articles with those to be ignored. --GuillaumeTell 18:07, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

OK, sorry, Hollingshead was a bad example. I'm trying to find out about the musical burlesques. I substituted the examples above. -- Ssilvers (talk) 18:15, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I agree that it would be better to leave Meyer Lutz and Osmond Carr in WP:MUSICALS. Indeed anything on the musical side of the musical/operetta divide would be best left to WP:MUSICALS. We want to avoid double bannering as much as possible. Any opera banners on Wagner or G&S articles should also come off of course as these are descendant projects. --Kleinzach 10:01, 1 June 2008 (UTC) P.S. The reason the bot run went wrong was because of non-opera project categories (particularly singers) linked to Category:Opera in the category hierarchy. --Kleinzach 10:12, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for this guidance. I do think there are a few articles where we need both tags, though, for example where a G&S performer later has a substantial opera career, don't you think? Best regards, -- Ssilvers (talk) 01:12, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

No, I don't think so. IMO the parent project defers to the descendant in its specialized field. However a major/minor project combined banner is something that is being considered for the future. Given the chaos caused by the premature bot run and the extra work it has created, we should leave this for later. --Kleinzach 01:36, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Just a note to say that (as with Hollingshead) Reece, Lutz, Carr and zillions of others are all categorised in Category:People associated with Gilbert and Sullivan and, if all goes well, will be ignored by Melonbot, along with another zillion in Category:Gilbert and Sullivan performers. As for burlesques, there's no doubt in my mind that they aren't really appropriate for the Opera Project. --GuillaumeTell 13:13, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

OK, thanks. This is clear now. -- Ssilvers (talk) 13:31, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, I mis-spoke slightly up above. The Bot-owner tells me that though the G&S category and its descendents were ignored, Lutz has now been given the Opera banner again because a) he has the category Opera composer and b) he doesn't have the G&S banner, so actually it does seem logical. Carr and Reece, however, have been left alone. --GuillaumeTell 16:30, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I changed the category for Lutz to musical theatre composers to better reflect the type of music that he was composing. -- Ssilvers (talk) 22:32, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

List of fictional literature mentioning opera

Some of you may recall that I helped to created this list, based on previous page generated by the e-mail list OPERA-L. Now Propaniac says that the quality is not to Wikipedia standards, and wants to submit a proposal to delete it. He was nice enough to warn me ahead of time. So I'm wondering if there are a couple of people out there who would like to discuss what can be done with the article to prevent deletion (and improve its quality). -- kosboot (talk) 13:01, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

If it came to an Afd I'd vote to keep it, but Propaniac does make some valid points. More explanation of what the list is and how it could be used would help. Perhaps one way to start would be to draft a longer introduction? --Kleinzach 14:23, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Some suggestions. I've had a look at both the list and at Propaniac's comments:

The list apparently has no standards for how meaningful the opera reference has to be for a book to be included, nor any kind of justification for why it's significant that these books mention opera. (There are also no citations, for what that's worth.)

I would tend to agree with her and I'm not sure I'd vote 'keep' if it were substantially in the same shape it's in now. Most of the entries are bare mentions of the work with no way of telling just what role opera plays in it. Is it a passing mention or allusion (listcruft) or a key aspect of the plot, setting, or characters? For now, I would suggest drastically pruning the list to those you know be of the latter type. Then for each of those add a sentence or two describing the role opera plays in the work. You also need to include full bibliographical information about the work, including date of first publication and what language it was originally written in. Bibliographic information for modern editions and/or translations of older works should also be included. That would take care of the referencing problems. I would also list the works individually with title first, Then I'd break the list down into time periods, e.g. 1800-1850, 1851-1900, etc. and list the books under their time periods chronologically, e.g.

1800-1850

• Ritter Gluck by E.T.A. Hoffmann, 1809. A short story originally published in German by Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. The story is about a man who meets, or believes he has met, the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87) more than twenty years after the latter's death. Gluck refers to Mozart as "a young friend of mine" and proceeds to give an elaborate critique of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. (Source: Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, translated and edited by Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight, University of Chicago Press, 1972. ISBN 0226347893.)
• Gambara by Honoré de Balzac, 1837. A novella originally published in French in Revue et gazette musicale de Paris. Gambara features an opera by its eponymous composer on the life of Mahomet, as well as a disquisition on Meyerbeer's opera Robert le diable. (Source: Gambara by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Clara Bell and James Waring, Project Gutenberg.)

It's a lot of work, and a lot of work to do quickly. I'm wondering if this should be done as a draft page either in user space or as a sub-page of the Opera Project, especially if the list gets proposed for deletion. Best, Voceditenore (talk) 15:32, 2 June 2008 (UTC) PS I also agree with Kleinzach that a longer introduction including a rationale for inclusion would be a help. Best, Voceditenore (talk) 15:44, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Note: A discussion has started now on Talk:List of fictional literature mentioning opera. Probably better to continue it there. Best, Voceditenore (talk) 18:12, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

MelonBot's latest banner run

Unfortunately Melonbot's latest run [4] - which ominously bannered an identical number of articles as last time (338) - has once again put banners on pages where we deleted them previously (Portal talk:Opera, Talk:Noël Coward, redirects like: Talk:Mamontov's Private Russian Opera in Moscow, Talk:Russian Private Opera). It seems the bot keeps trying to replace banners when they are taken off.

Help checking the list (above) would be appreciated. The run has in any case brought up a whole lot of marginal and problematic material. I'm also concerned about the amount of double, triple and quadruple bannering we are seeing, particularly with composers - which other people may see as aggressive marking of articles beyond the reasonable scope of our work (à la the Biography Project). Obviously we should not be doing any further bot operations until we have cleaned up and re-established a reliable list of opera articles as we had before these MelonBot runs started. --Kleinzach 00:57, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm afraid that the above is a rather partial and unfair assessment of what has been happening and what has been achieved. Bots simply do what they are told. In the case of the unsatisfactory first run, which was started without our knowledge, it was told to go through all articles in Category:Opera, and all the sub-categories and sub-sub-categories, and put the opera banner on articles that didn't already have it. As some of you know, there were three problems which could and should have been prevented:

• Articles about non-operatic singers were given the banner. The reason for this was that Category:Opera singers had a sub-category Category:Singers by range, which actually consisted of non-opera singers (ranging from Axl Rose to Cher) who were classified as Tenors, Sopranos, etc., but not Operatic Tenors, Operatic Sopranos, etc. This problem was not the Bot's fault - it was the fault of whoever made Singers by range a sub-category of Opera singers.
• Articles about oratorios were given the banner. This was because Category:Operas by genre had Category:Oratorios as a sub-category. Again, this was not the Bot's fault.
• Articles in Category:Gilbert and Sullivan (a sub-category of Category:Operettas) were given the banner. We had asked for G&S and Wagner article to be excluded, but the Bot's owner had carelessly only excluded Wagner articles.

All of these problems were corrected before the second run, in the first two cases by removing the incorrect category linkages and in the second case by the Bot-owner doing what he was told. Kleinzach complains above about banners reappearing. That happened to articles which continued to be in a sub-category of Opera. If you don't want Noël Coward to be part of the opera project, you don't just remove the banner - you remove the category that is causing the banner to be placed on the article, in this case Category:Operetta composers, or you stop Operetta composers from being a sub-category of Category:Opera composers.

As for Opera composers themselves, why shouldn't they have the Opera Project banner as well as the Composers banner? And as for redirects, such as Russian Private Opera, they were bannered because they have a category that is a subcategory of Opera (most redirects don't have categories). And the Portal is in Category:Opera, so the Bot bannered it.

If anybody really wants to go through the 338 articles and remove any banners, please also remove the reason (i.e. the Category) why the banner has been placed on the article - contact me if you have any queries. As far as I can see, the Bot did exactly as it was told, the run was a success, and we now should have a complete match between non-Wagner, non-G&S articles in Category:Opera and its sub-categories. It's very easy to create an article and forget to put the banner on its talk page, and the Bot has rectified that.

--GuillaumeTell 11:11, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure a postmortem is helpful, however for the record, the category structure, especially that of the singers, dates back to the beginning of the project - before any of us were involved. It has always been cross-project, easily changed and inherently unreliable. No one person, or group of people, is responsible for that. The structure is difficult to visualize. It's easy to see the contents of the categories, but it's much more difficult to see how they interrelate. Mediawiki categorization is extremely flexible. (You can see that in the way that Opera at the higher level relates, not just to the Performing Arts, but also to Music and Theatre.)

That's why Peter Cohen and I compiled the (original opera category list) before the successful SatyrBot run. Also why I expressed my concern on 30 May when Happy Melon wrote "There are 874 subcategories of Category:Opera . . . there are 5,736 pages . . . which implies that about 1,200 templates will be added), all in one go." I wrote to GuillaumeTell and said "Rather than doing all the Category:Opera subcats and adding (according to HM) about 1200 new pages, I think it would be safer to edit the catlist adding opera designers etc etc . . . and run through these. I'm concerned that if we add the 1,200 new pages we'll find a lot which aren't ours . . . ."

Anyway the past is past, we should work with what we have got. IMO the problem we need to look at now is whether we have bannered too many articles of marginal importance. Up to now we've never assumed that all articles with opera categories must have opera banners. In my view the banner should indicate a substantial involvement. It's not necessary to banner Jules Verne, Felix Mendelssohn, W H Auden, Gustav Mahler, George Bernard Shaw and the like, if we are going to be very minor contributors to their articles. I'd prefer to see our banner used conservatively, cautiously, non-aggressively. The project shouldn't be marking territory in the style of the Biography Project! --Kleinzach 14:38, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

I must confess to having wondered why these category problems were occurring after the compilation of last year's list. I agree that the banner should be used conservatively particularly on people articles, even when it comes to composers in the standard opera house repertory. Do we need to "own" Ludwig van Beethoven?--Peter cohen (talk) 16:12, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Well, despite the hiccups, it looks like the Bot project has been helpful in clarifying a few category issues and also in getting more of the opera project articles assessed. Thanks to GT and K for their hard work, and I am sure that the owner of the Bot also worked very hard to try to accommodate the project, and I thank him for that. Some manual adjusting of the assessments will contine to be necessary, and of course new articles are always written, but I think the opera project will benefit, as the G&S project and musicals projects have benefitted, from the information made available by the assessments. BTW, is the Bot finished, or will it need to do more runs? As I suggested before, if the Bot is finished, it may be helpful to divide the alphabet (or subcats?) up among the members of the project and let everyone check the banners on article in one letter (or subcat) to see if the assessments are accurate and up to date. Best regards, -- Ssilvers (talk) 16:54, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

I can see the point about Verne and co, but I think that Kleinzach is (unusually) being rather timid about the banner. I don't recollect anyone here objecting to "our" articles having all sorts of France/Germany/wherever banners put on the talk pages. The Biography Project is only a problem because of its obsession with infoboxes. As for Beethoven, he did spend a great deal of time and effort on Leonore/Fidelio and I don't think anyone here would be treading on anyone else's toes by increasing the space devoted to it in his article. There are a number of composers, from Gluck and earlier up to Janacek, Strauss, Britten and Birtwistle whose main output was/is opera and I certainly don't think that we should avoid improving their articles or putting the Opera banner on them just because the Composers Project got there first.

In reply to Ssilvers, yes, the Bot has finished. Incidentally, the total number of banners added (after the initial problems) was nothing like 1200. --GuillaumeTell 18:20, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

The people you list, are clearly opera composers. I would also consider that the likes of Mozart and Dvorak should have our label because their contribution to the genre is large scale enough to merit considerable coverage in their article. If you look at the article on LvB, you'll find that Fidelio gets slight coverage. Even if the article reached GA or above, I don't think it would get more than a short paragraph. This is because his standing and significance as a symphonist, a pianist-composer, a chamber composer is so much greater than his standing and significance as an opera composer. Even though Prince Igor is less performed, away from Russia, than Fidelio, it is just one of a handful of Borodin's works that are well known. Therefore a GA article on him has to discuss it more thoroughly than one on Beethoven. For that reason, I would want WPO to claim his article but not Beethoven, in the same way that I would want us to have Ernest Newman and not GBS, Knappertsbusch and not Mahler, Hoffmannsthal and not Auden.--Peter cohen (talk) 18:48, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

A point that I should have made before is that a WP assessment process (which is why we went in for the bannering and auto-assessing of articles) may also include an importance scale. Quite a few other projects make decisions about importance to their projects, and regard this as helpful in deciding priorities. For example, the Yorkshire Project, as well as assessing articles, assigns them to Top, High, Mid and Low importance, and this table shows that, for example, there are two FA articles with the Yorkshire banner that are regarded as of low importance to the Yorkshire project (they are York City F.C. and Stocksbridge Park Steels F.C., since you ask). Thus, there would, IMO, be no problem with Opera-bannering articles such as Mahler and Verne, and thus maintaining what I regard as an important link between our categories and our banner, if they were given the Low priority which (from an Opera point of view) they deserve. Multiple bannering is widespread all over WP these days and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Using Peter's example, we would perhaps rate the Beethoven article as Mid importance. --GuillaumeTell 21:02, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps the time has indeed come to discuss adding an importance scale? Up to now I've been against anything that takes significant time away from creating and developing articles, but the issue seems to be at the heart of the problem of marginally-relevant articles. However if we went ahead with it we'd need to be absolutely clear about what we are doing and not blunder through it like the last bot runs. As a result of the latter we now have 4,915 articles (last count) - up by about 400 from the previous total - which is too large for hand checking. We have to remember that despite the extraordinary production of the project (57 archives as well as the articles) we still have only a few editors here and this is not likely to grow given the technical demands of the subject in terms of skills and languages. --Kleinzach 22:51, 3 June 2008 (UTC) P.S. My favourite misbannering on the last run was Chichibu, Saitama a small town in the mountains north of Tokyo. It's where I got married! --Kleinzach 23:10, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

And is in Category:Gilbert and Sullivan - did you know of that connexion when you got married?! Oh, and no-one is suggesting that a Bot should allocate importance ratings. --GuillaumeTell 00:13, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

We use an importance scale at the G&S project but do *not* use it at the musicals project. Having worked extensively with both, I would say that I think the importance scale is more trouble than it is worth. Why not focus on updating the quality assessments first, and then see if you want to devote the energy to importance. I think there is little bang for the buck there. All the best, -- Ssilvers (talk) 15:23, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Well, we certainly need to decide first how to do the quality assessments, given the numbers that Kleinzach has reported above. The point about the importance scale is that it should enable us, collectively, to agree which existing articles should be developed to GA/FA standard and to set up collaborations to work on them. Most of us currently spend our time on new articles or developing stubs, whereas (IMO) there are plenty of long-standing articles whose quality is low but whose importance is high. --GuillaumeTell 21:31, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Pastoral operas

I noticed we have a category for pastoral operas but no article on the topic. There is a brief discussion in the article pastoral but I am not sure that readers would know to go to that page. Should we write one?Nrswanson (talk) 08:26, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

User:LiniShu was going to write an article on Pastoral opera (IIRC). We do have a brief one on Pastorale héroïque. --Folantin (talk) 08:37, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I left a note on LiniShu's talk page.Nrswanson (talk) 10:30, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Opera Grove has a four-page article under the heading "Pastoral" which could provide plenty of material. The Oxford Dictionary of Opera only has an article on "Pastorale", apparently the original form of pastoral opera. --GuillaumeTell 10:45, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks maybe we could work on writing one. I contacted LiniShu and she responded on my talk page. I am putting part of her message below as I think it is relevant here.Nrswanson (talk) 08:16, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Regarding the pastoral opera article: I only had an outline with a little bit of text started; I haven't done any work on it in over a year. The outline is at User:LiniShu/ClipBoard. If either you or anyone else is interested in taking up this endeavor, please be my guest, and please consider this reply an invitation for anyone to copy all or part of the material found at the userspace link above, for incorporation into an article. If someone else creates an article, I might be interested in contributing some sourced material to it.

Thanks for your courtesy in inquiring about it; hope to talk to you again. Cheers, Lini (talk) 20:38, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

(outdent) - Yes, I'd just like to repeat here, for the record, that I'd be pleased, and supportive, if another editor (or editors) "picked up" this endeavor. Thanks, Lini (talk) 12:15, 5 June 2008 (UTC)