…to the Community Forum's talk page! This is the place to talk about the site with other editors, make plans for future changes, discuss problems and discover solutions.

One of our regular editors from down under, Humbug, has recently requested a "Current Projects" page to make it easier to keep up with what's going on, because as he says:

"Basically, if you want to keep up with what's going on it involves reading a bunch of Mod's talk pages, this page, etc. and there's so much there that it takes a while to get your head around it and find out what changes the community are working on at the time." After being absent from the site myself a lot in recent weeks and having one of the longest, if not the longest watchlists on the site, I can only but agree. So here goes Humbug, this one's for you and a little bit for me…!

Oh and have fun, keep a cool head in discussions, and remember to always sign your posts!  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 11:34, November 22, 2009 (UTC)

• Topics are in relative chronological order, top to bottom, so please add your post at the bottom of the page.
• For questions about editing, see the Help Pages. If you still can't find what you're looking for, post your question at the Help Desk.

• Current projects with links to discussions: [edit]

• Further discussions can be found by following the links on the Long Term Projects page.

New Wikia look coming to LyricWiki soon (early! :D) Edit

Setting it upEdit

Howdy, If you've been watching the Wikia blog, you know about the "New Look" that Wikia has been working on. Several LyricWikians are also in the private Beta test.

Well, I've got some good news (which I already spoiled by the section-name... doh!) and that's that LyricWiki will be getting the new look very soon (in minutes!). We'll probably get it within the next day or two. If you want to take a peek at it, the new skin is already enabled on a few wikis for testing - such as Muppet Wiki, TrueBlood Wiki, and a handful of others.

I've grown to really like the new skin, so I thought enabling the skin early would be a great opportunity for us to kick the tires before everyone else (and we might get some bonus traffic from other people who want to see the new skin early!).

What this means for you! - there are a few things that are notable about this switch.

1. It's fixed-width. This annoyed a few wikis, but it actually looks great (in my opinion) on lyrics pages since lyrics aren't very wide anyway. It's a bit of an adjustment to get used to on talk pages. The main thing I can reassure you with though, is that I was hesitant of the new skin for a while, but I've been using it for a couple of months now, and now when I log out and accidentally see the old skin (Monaco), it looks really, really bad to me by comparison and I instantly switch back.
2. Monaco is going away. This is primarily because it's really hard to maintain a number of new skins. People can still use Monobook (which is kind of Buyer-Beware since we don't work on it that much), but it'll let us make more improvements faster since we're working on one skin.

Let me know your thoughts about it! :) It's still new, so we've got a lot more speed-improvements and such that we're working on, so it's only going to get better.
-Sean Colombo 00:36, October 15, 2010 (UTC)

Oops, false-start ;) Released it for a second and cleared all of our caches and the site slowed way down. We have to be more careful with how we turn it on since LyricWiki is so big. Going to try it again tomorrow!

-Sean Colombo 00:54, October 15, 2010 (UTC)

Couldn't be that private of a beta test if even I was invited to enable the new skin.

So far, other than the stars (see above), my main annoyance is that it's not as obvious that a Talk page is nonexistent (instead of looking for the red "Talk" link on a tab, I have to notice that the speech balloon says "0") -- I can see myself forgetting to enter Page Ranking info in the future.

Other than that, I guess I just have to get used to where all the links are now. I had a hard time finding "Follow" earlier today, for whatever reason, but now I know where it is. And knowing is half the battle. Trainman 01:03, October 15, 2010 (UTC)

Visited link colourEdit

After using the new skin for about two weeks, my main annoyance is now that there's no distinction between visited and unvisited links. When I'm editing, I often find it helpful to know which songs I've clicked on previously (e.g., attempting to make sense of a gigantic "Other Songs" list on an artist page). Trainman 17:12, October 27, 2010 (UTC)

If you use Firefox, install the add-on Stylish. Create a domain-wide stylesheet for lyrics.wikia.com and insert this CSS definition:

a:visited {color: purple !important;}

This will shade visited links in purple f. e. - Chris 17:41, October 28, 2010 (UTC)

Fixed widthEdit

The fixed-width doesn't help on many lyric subpages where the transl(iter)ation and original are side-by-side, line-by-line using {{Translation}}. Perhaps only on pages where {{Translation}} is called, enable variable-width, if possible? --Geopgeop 04:15, October 18, 2010 (UTC)

But as all viewers have the same width, you can align the lyrics by multiple linebreaks and be sure it matches all other resolutions, too. So it actually helps to align them. - Chris 19:00, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

Text search and highlightingEdit

Pretty annoying with the new look : since the song text is not any more a text, WE CANNOT MAKE A SEARCH for a word or a sentence !!! if you want to make a search, you have to edit the song ! i hate that -- Krn02 14:16, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

First: who is "we"? Second: what search do you mean? The Firefox searchbar (Ctrl+F) does find and highlight matches in the lyricsbox as it always did. - Chris 19:00, October 26, 2010 (UTC)

"we" is, i suppose, "any user" + firefox's CTRL-F does NOT work any more in the said lyricsbox, the yellow one, since it's not possible to select/highlight text as well (as it is explained on the FAQ page (the very first section)) ! Krn02 09:40, October 27, 2010 (UTC)

This isn't related to the new skin, though -- the lyrics box works the same in both new and old.

If the search-on-a-page functionality is very important to you, you might try a different browser, which may handle the Javascript differently. With Safari on the Mac, for example, Command-F works fine to find and highlight within the lyrics box. I believe that's because Safari's "find" highlighting has a different functionality from "selection" highlighting, whereas on Firefox, they seem more closely related (i.e., they "look" the same). It's "selection" highlighting that's deliberately being blocked, as the FAQ refers to. Trainman 17:12, October 27, 2010 (UTC)

For Firefox, there's the add-on GreaseMonkey and there is userscripts.org, but even without that tools, search still works for me: Screencast video - Chris 17:53, October 28, 2010 (UTC)

interesting: the text of any song is a text again, yeah, and the search function does work again! ...by the way (for trainman), i use firefox and i'm not going to change because of (old) lyricwiki bad design -- Krn02 05:38, April 27, 2011 (UTC)

Z-OrdersEdit

Different Z-orders in FF & IE: Wasn't going to describe here what I think about all these 'beauties' of the new skin, but this little one was too irresistible: if you are IE-adopt, then before deleting any page, marked for deletion, now you must open this page for edit, remove deletion template, save the page and only then you'll be able to delete it! The reason is very 'serious': html elements have different z-orders in IE and FF. Deletion pop-up menu appears in FF without any problems (), while in IE it's partially hidden (), making deletion just impossible. No more comments :). Wait, just one question - what for have I got a huge monitor, if usefull part of LW page takes only measly 680px of it's enormous width? --Senvaikis ^(talk) 13:34, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, strange. That ul-element has z-index 100. The version history has z-index 20 million (to be assured, I guess). What z-index does the template have? But try Alt+Shift+D (accesskey for "deletion"), might be faster as anything else. I'm currently waiting for some time to try to hack the site and make a Stylish-stylesheet available for full-width. - Chris 20:23, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

Have you ever tried this kbd shortcut on IE, Chris? I suspect you haven't, otherwise you'd knew it doesn't work :). But truth to tell, it's not a big problem for me (using mostly FF @LW) - issue was used just an illustration for the main new skin's sin: functionality now is secondary matter compared to it's exterior. No need to go far for a next sample: take the same action of page deletion. When I see a page flagged for deletion, usually I want to assure that page may be actually deleted (f.e., the deletion reason is "no lyrics", but lyrics may be just accidentally remarked). So, I'm opening the page for edit, see that page should be deleted, but then I suddenly realise that just can't delete this page right now - there's no "delete" link in edit page anymore! So, - the same song - I must exit from edit window, returning back to the page, and only then delete it. Or I'm just very unobservant, and this "delete" link does exist on edit page? But even then I'd say that's a bad functional design, not a user ;) nite, ---Senvaikis ^(talk) 22:26, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

For IE: open the dropdown, press Alt+D to select the shortcut, press Enter to click on it. But I have to admit that Oasis looks horrible in IE. The dropdown has no background-colour, and is underneath the complete article. I can't even access the deletelink when there's no deletion template on, because the drowdown is below the Song template, too. I'm testing it with IE Beta 9. It's not as bad as IE 8 anymore, it passes the Acid3 test with 100%. Even Firefox has only 96%. Obviously, wikia is too focused on Firefox atm. - Chris 16:49, November 5, 2010 (UTC)

Merging LOTR and Howard Shore Edit

A suggestion: shouldn't The Lord Of The Rings soundtrack be merged into Howard Shore's page? --LYRIC-Stormwatch 03:54, October 15, 2010 (UTC)

Translated lyrics Edit

Hi everyone,

I have a question regarding translations of lyrics. Some translations are to be found on the main page (like here), other translations can be found on a separate page (like here). Which way is the better one? I think there should be a stndard, at least for lyrics of the same artist/band. --Kopf101 09:53, October 24, 2010 (UTC)

There is a standard; see Help:Translations. It's still fairly new, however, and a lot of songs haven't been updated yet and still have the translation on the main page. — 6×9 (Talk) 09:59, October 24, 2010 (UTC)

Ah, okay, thanks :) --Kopf101 10:37, October 24, 2010 (UTC)

I think that categories for translated songs might be broken. For example, Language/Bengali should contain several of my contributions, but it does not. For example Geeta Dutt:Nishi Raat Baanka Chand Akashe is missing, even though the song page lists the language as a categorisation. ShaheedHaque 19:31, December 17, 2010 (UTC)

Yes, some categories trend to 'forget' their members for some still unknown reason. There's only one surefire method to 'refresh their memory' - any kind of edit on potential members of category. So, after null-edit (or 'touching' - just opening and saving without any changes) on mentioned song it reappeared in Bengali songs category. hth,--Senvaikis ^(talk) 22:47, December 17, 2010 (UTC)

Indeed, I had spotted that. But after a while, I gave up on that. I sure hope this gets fixed soon. ShaheedHaque 00:11, December 18, 2010 (UTC)

Featured Artists Edit

On most pages for songs that have featured artists, the singer's name would appear in brackets ([]) above each part that they sang. But when I was reading the lyrics to B.o.B:Airplanes, I saw that the singer's name wasn't in brackets, but wrapped in both italic and bold marks. I've been doing this for all the featured songs I come by, but I really need some help. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mace170 (talk • contribs), 20:25, November 4, 2010 (UTC).

I always prefer bold and italic, as [ ] brackets are reserved and ( ) brackets usually belong to the lyrics. - Chris 16:40, November 5, 2010 (UTC)

So you'll help change all the featured singer's to bold and italic rather than brackets? — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mace170 (talk • contribs), 21:48, November 5, 2010 (UTC).

As it is only optical and not functional, it's not an urgent issue. You needn't do that. I always do that if I come across any page with it and have the time to change it (i.e. I'm not in a series of automated edits) - Chris 03:46, November 6, 2010 (UTC) P.S.: Please sign your posts with 4 tildes: ~~~~

On references, or "How do I know this is true?" Edit

Hi all. I'm fresh off Wikipedia and would love to help out here, at least with getting my favourite band lyrics in tip-top shape. As a Wikipedian (admin), I'm used to constantly being on the lookout for unreferenced claims (there's A LOT of subtle trolls out there), and as such when I came here it struck me as odd that you just add a credits section to songs without any "proof" that it is true. Of course I realize that not everyone want to go hunting for sources, but it's something worth thinking about.

In Ulver:Østenfor Sol Og Vestenfor Måne I have given an example of how one could mention how we know that these persons actually composed the song. It uses Template:Reflist, which could be prettier but that would require tweaking the CSS layouts and I don't have that kind of access .

Anyway, what made me think about this was when I added a composer without actually knowing if it was true. I just thought "Hey, he plays the majority of the instruments on the demo, so he probably composes the songs as well". Then later I started having second thoughts and went googling, and it turns out he's NOT the sole composer of the band, so I went ahead and removed the claim again. I wonder how many more wrong credits are here? Sourcing our credits claims would help clear these kind of things up.

I'm not suggesting a purge of unsourced claims, but rather that we encourage a uniform way of sourcing our claims. Anyone have any thoughts about this? --Lhademmor (/M.P./) 13:25, November 7, 2010 (UTC)

Hi Lhademmor and welcome here at LyricWiki.

First I'd like to thank you for actively participating in the project. It's always cool to have users that have ideas for it. Now let me reply to your post:

The thoughts you have are typical for Wikipedians heading over to LW. There are several "problems" or things that seem strange to them... One is the page naming convention (every contentpage's title has the first letter uppercased for each word), the second is the template-dependency of LW (estimated 95% of our content are lists, templates or in between the lyrics-tags), and the third point is how we handle our content, which is the point you're asking about.

As a matter of fact, LyricWiki is not an encyclopedia of lyrics. So we neither raise a claim to be complete nor correct. This applies to the lyrics, the bands and the additional information we provide to anything:

• Every content belonging here is welcome. We do not delete artistpages because of irrelevance, to name a very big difference to Wikipedia. If you had a band in your hometown, you may have an artistpage here.
• A little is better than nothing. There's not something like "quality standards" in the sense of Wikipedian criteria. So even a lyrics page with just one third or maybe even less of the lyrics is better than nothing (except it's wrong or horribly formatted, but we usually try to format a page before we'd delete it).
• A comprehensible redirect is good. We have masses of redirects around here, but we do not delete them (deliberately). In our opinion every correct redirect is worth its existance, because it leads a searching user who made a mistake to the correct page and the content he was searching for. I miss that mentality at Wikipdia, btw
• Slightly wrong content is better than no content. This seems strange, but it becomes clear with the following example: "We got some sand in our stilettos" instead of "We don't mind sand in our stilettos" (example taken from California Gurls) is still much better than no content or questionmarks, isn't it? There's a saying which meets the mentality here best I think: do as good as you can, but don't agonize. If something is wrong and someone knows better or feels "offended" about any wrong information, he may edit it.

So to keep it easy for our users, we do not require or encourage sourcing, not until it comes to editwars or discussions about correctness. Then we try to find the sources. So yes, it may be that the composers, lyricists and such are wrong sometimes. But as people usually enter additional information in an extra step, I assume they edit because they know. Why should one exert himself elsewise?

This is what I think is the situation around here. If I'm wrong and we really just didn't think about sourcing such information so far, the others will correct me . - Chris 22:24, November 7, 2010 (UTC)

Hi Chris, thank you very much for the detailed answer! Yes, I guess I need a little while to get used to the new mentality . Anyway, to get back to Agalloch:This Old Cabin: It's an old song from a demo tape which was only released in 200 copies. As such I have absolutely no idea who composed it, even though I've googled all over the place. That's what's keeping the song from a Gold rating. What's the recommended course of action here? To be content with a Silver rating and just hope that someday someone from the band comes along and recalls the details?

But hey, maybe I'm putting too much into the whole page ranking business - what can I say, I'm a sucker for visual results and The Stunningly Stellar Star-o-Meter got me hooked :P --Lhademmor (M.P.) 08:52, November 8, 2010 (UTC)

Knowing nothing about Agalloch other than what I just read on Wikipedia: since they're from the Pacific Northwest, is it possible that "This Old Cabin" is a cover of a song a couple decades prior? In the BMI database, there's a song called "This Old Cabin" written by a man named Harlan Weniger, who appears to have been in a couple of obscure bands in the Pacific Northwest in the late '60s/early '70s.

Since I'm someone who's added a bunch of songwriting credits here: I can assure you, I don't guess at them. I'm usually either looking at the liner notes on an actual CD, or the BMI or ASCAP database searches, or Wikipedia (and, yes, I know Wikipedia's not 100% accurate on songwriting credits -- I do try to verify elsewhere if something looks seriously fishy). Trainman 03:58, November 10, 2010 (UTC)

Thoughts on a mobile app? Edit

Hiya,
There are a bunch of mobile apps for lyrics. Many of which use the LyricWiki:API... but I thought it'd be cool if we made our own open-source LyricWiki mobile app also. I've started playing with the Appcelerator Titanium framework which can be used to make Android and iPhone/iPad apps pretty easily (BlackBerry support coming in a couple of months supposedly).

Does anyone have any thoughts on the app that they'd like me to know about? Cool ideas are always welcome, but even if you just want to reiterate which features are most important to you (maybe the speed and percentage-of-matches-found are the only things important to you? Perhaps you want an app you can browse to find cool stuff when you're bored?

One quick note: this is meant to be a lyrics app rather than a good mobile interface for the site. At the moment, I'm not planning on making it a full GUI for the wiki (eg: probably won't see talk-pages on it). Wikia is planning on a general mobile app which should make mobile usage of the site itself a lot easier though.

Once there is something worth showing, I'll put the code in Wikia's public SVN repository and put up a link.

Let me know your thoughts! Thanks! :)
-Sean Colombo 17:59, November 11, 2010 (UTC)

Any news about progress in making us mobile? (next 2 weeks - without broadband link)--Senvaikis ^(talk) 08:44, March 1, 2011 (UTC)

Can someone finish some partial lyrics Edit

I vahe already asked from one user to finish these, but he told that this could be a god place to post a request. So if anyone has time, you could finish these lyrics.

Cheek:Tultiin Nähtiin Voitettiin I Couldn't find it from YouTube

Uniikki:Money I Couldn't find it from YouTube

Rockin Da North:Täällä Taas http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPBfPUQtInA

Rockin Da North:My Crime Is Hip Hop http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI_4Ol_I8qo

Rockin Da North:Operaatio RDN http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF6UnQs8SnM

Rockin Da North:One World http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugljrYVD0yU

Konala Cartelli:Konala Cartelli Pt.2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQwh9q5ivbs

Royal Family:Usko Unelmii http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXrDzn-6lSU

YOR123 & Skandaali:Bad Mood http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veL2OHNZaQE

YOR123 & Skandaali:City At Night http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-Gh5sWT1Nk

YOR123 & Skandaali:Keep Distance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8Pd0e4bG3s

YOR123 & Skandaali:On A Mission http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAs5YCE8aJg

YOR123 & Skandaali:Then Death Comes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1KiuVA5thU

YOR123 & Skandaali:I Need Money I Couldn't find it from YouTube

YOR123 & Skandaali:You Left Me I Couldn't find it from YouTube

Prybar 13:00, November 27, 2010 (UTC)

Two things: (1) The language is called "Deutsch" (you missed the s) . (2) I'd love to do it, but unfortunately, Sony requested to block this videos for (at least) Germany. Modern discrimination... - Chris 15:32, February 13, 2011 (UTC)

Suggestion for credits Edit

Hello everyone,

I have a suggestion regarding the credits section on the song pages. I think it would be nice if there were templates similar to the "Genres" and "Labels" ones on artist pages.

For example, the templates

{Composer|Number 1|Number 2|Number 3}
{Lyricist|Number 4|Number 5}

Could create

Credits

• Composer: Number 1, Number 2 and Number 3
• Lyrics by Number 4 and Number 5

Of course, we would need another template for "Written by".

I think this would be nice for two reasons:

a) there would be categories like "Songs written by..." b) the formatting would look the same on all song pages

What do you think? --Kopf101 10:03, December 7, 2010 (UTC)

I am willing to switch to using a template for the credits if one gets created, although I'd strongly suggest coming up with one single template, rather than the three different templates that you suggest above.

I also have to say that I don't like the term "composer" used with the rock/pop music that dominates here (it seems too "classical"). I also don't like "written by," which seems a bit too ambiguous when it's used here: does it mean just the lyrics -- since the music obviously isn't being presented here -- or does it mean both the music and the lyrics?

That's why I use "Music and lyrics by (name)" -- or "Music by (name); lyrics by (name)" -- which seem to me to be the most elegant, yet clear, method of presenting the information. Trainman 17:05, December 7, 2010 (UTC)

I agree with you, I just wanted to suggest a template in general. I would also prefer something like "Music by" and "Lyrics by". One template would be enough for that. :) --Kopf101 17:57, December 7, 2010 (UTC)

The reasons we never created such a template (although it has been suggested a few times in the past) are that (1) using the template wouldn't really save the editors any work and (2) it wouldn't be as flexible as a simple header with bullet points. The credits section can contain a lot of additional information besides composer/lyricist, like musicians, recording dates and/or locations, "contains a sample of…" etc.

We could justify such a template if we used it to put the text in a pretty box though :-) Maybe something roughly like this (which could accomodate the trivia section as well):

On a related topic, I've recently seen {{ArtistInfo}} used on album pages. Might as well get a complete set… — 6×9 (Talk) 18:55, December 8, 2010 (UTC)

Hm, ok, I see the point. Still, another pro would be that there would also be the category "songs missing credits"... IMO additional credits could still be added if we had a section called "writers". I also like the idea with the pretty box. --Kopf101 19:13, December 8, 2010 (UTC)

Regarding the box, I start the credits line with a space, so it appears in a grey box, which is not pretty, but a box nonetheless :-) Darknite 20:55, December 8, 2010 (UTC)

I Implemented a template called {{CreditBox}}. You can see it in action at Weto:Tief. Regarding the type of entries I oriented myself on Help:Contents/Editing/Formatting/Songs#Credits. Now that I see the table above I'm asking myself if that design is better for this purpose; it is far more compact. -- Salandas 03:25, January 5, 2012 (UTC)

Because I needed to extend the Template a bit, I decided to switch the design to the beautiful table above. The colors still do not match to the <lyrics>-one, but are better than before. (old Version) The Template now features following fields:

• Written by:
• Music by: (only when "Written by:" not set)
• Lyrics by: (only when "Written by:" not set)
• Arrangement: (for the case that the arrangement happened seperately)
• Musicians: (intended for a list of the Musicians actually playing this song, most bands change their lineup permanently, so the credits go to the right persons)
• More Infos: (Trivia or so...)

--Salandas 17:27, January 7, 2012 (UTC)

Nice! For the mock-up above I went with the same color scheme as {{TranslatedSong}}, since that one was designed by LWChris, who's our resident web design expert.

One small suggestion: I'd replace the rather generic "More Info" header with "Trivia" and add an optional custom field (or two), like header1/text1 in {{ArtistInfo}}, so people can add more esoteric stuff like recording date/location etc. Oh, and maybe a "Produced by" field… — 6×9 (Talk) 20:53, January 7, 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback. since I'm not a webdesign expert I take the colors for good now. I agree to your feedback, so this is the changelist:

• More Infos is now Trivia
• Added fields Produced by and Co-Produced by (since they are often there, too)
• Added 5 custom fields (since you don't know what ideas others might have besides location and date, I thought 5 might be better ;-) )

The documentation is up to date, too. — Salandas (Talk) 21:40, January 7, 2012 (UTC)

akumaEdit

Some time ago LW's contract with akuma ran out, so we don't have to keep the links around. Also some time ago they changed their link format, and now many album links don't work (and can't be fixed without a lot of effort). Does anyone actually find these links useful? If not, a cyborg will remove them shortly. — 6×9 (Talk) 15:29, December 7, 2010 (UTC)

IMO these links can be removed. --Kopf101 17:58, December 7, 2010 (UTC)

The only thing that speaks for akuma is that it's a german site. But I'm ok with AllMusic. Darknite47 18:31, December 7, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, the info seems redundant w/allmusic IDs now. Safe to remove.

-Sean Colombo 22:06, January 6, 2011 (UTC)

Wrong page rankings Edit

Hi,

I have noticed that there are many gold song pages, artist pages and album pages that souldn't be gold according to the criteria. For example, I have seen many songs by Ali Project that are ranked gold but are not certified and don't have someone watching them. Maybe a bot could solve the song problem by setting all songs that are not watched by someone back to bronze? Otherwise it looks like a lot of work to do. There are also some albums and artists that are ranked gold although many (or most) of the songs are still green. --Kopf101 00:17, December 14, 2010 (UTC)

Android app beta testers? Edit

Hi all!
I've been working on an Android app to access LyricWiki lyrics and am planning to have a really basic version done in a week or two (I am only able to steal a few hours at night to work on it here or there).

If you have an Android device and would be willing to download an .apk file and load it onto your device, please let me know (send me your email address, please) and I'll let you know when the beta is out.

As far as the beta goes, you can give as much or as little feedback as you'd like... just be prepared for a small handful of emails (one for each beta release, probably an email when we go live with a final version on the marketplace, etc.).

Let me know :)
Thanks!
-Sean Colombo 22:33, January 6, 2011 (UTC)

Cool experiments ... we want your feedback :) Edit

I spent some time with the Content team at Wikia and we thought of some fun experiments that could make the site better. We'd love your feedback on them!

1. Having some sort of "fan" section on artist pages. This would be for less structured data about the artists: tour dates, quick bios, slideshow galleries (Wikia has a cool extension for that), rumors of upcoming albums, etc.. Here were some possible ideas:
   • Have the bios be at the top of the page before the discography (essentially to the left of the infoboxes).
   • If these sections were built to be bigger, then maybe they should go below the discography, with a link to "jump down to bio below" or something.
   • As an experiment, we're going to be doing these for 3 artists ... check 'em out and let us know what you think or chip in: Britney Spears, Ke$ha, Katy Perry.
2. Turning 'Top 10 lists' extension on. This would let people make personal lists like "my favorite 10 songs of 2010", "The top 50 best lyrics from the 1950s", "Most Romantic Death Metal Lyrics", etc.. We already have lists on the site, but the Top 10 Lists extension makes them a bit easier to make & significantly better-looking.
3. Main Page polish - our Main Page is quite functional & awesome, but could use a little polish to look better. We're planning to add a slider to see if that helps promote certain pages that the wiki community thinks are important. What are some pages you think we should be promoting first?
   • Since the Grammy's are coming up, we'll probably link to a Grammy's page.
   • In general, the most popular artists of the moment would be a good default to fill the other slots.
   • To see how cool the sliders look in action, check out Mad Men Wiki
   • Do you think it makes sense to make the iTunes Top 10 in the main part of the page have pictures next to it? It should be easy for me to make that happen automatically after I finish some code I'm writing. Seems like a good idea to me... thoughts?
4. Contests! There are occasionally contests on certain wikis and they've tended to generate a lot of excitement & bring in new users. One issue that occurred to me is that the contests are usually US-only (since it's dumb to spend $58 to ship a $20 gift-card to someone in Dubai ;) - that kills the budget for other contests) ... Anywho: LyricWiki is a very international wiki & we're also smart. Therefore, I think it makes sense for us to figure out a way to make the contests international. If you have any ideas on how to pull this off, please put them below. Here's one of my ideas:
   • If the user is in the US, give them an iTunes card, if they're in a Spotify-legal country, give them a Spotify Pro certificate online.
   • Do something like give them a Grooveshark VIP account (I _think_ that's global?)

So, look out for these fun experiments (which will stick around if they work out)... and if you have any thoughts on the above, please share! :D
-Sean Colombo 23:52, January 10, 2011 (UTC)

Just a head's up: XD1 (and possibly some others) from the content team will be helping out on LyricWiki. Among other things, they might be adding images that will be unused for a while, whilst they work on making PhotoGalleries (eg: for one of the three test pages mentioned above) or other things. They are good with wikis but probably unfamiliar with LyricWiki's specific rules & might need some guidance at first.

Thank for the help!

-Sean Colombo 01:44, January 25, 2011 (UTC)

The artist info is up on Britney Spears and so is the experimental Fans page. They got us off to a good start & gathered cool info... hopefully we can adjust it to fit better with the site & be more easily extensible to other artists (probably should have more CSSed text instead of images of text... make templates for things... etc.). But the layout is just a guess too... if anyone has cool ideas for these new pages, just jump in and do them! :)
Hopefully we can change the pages to the point that we think they're really cool & will get ppl to stay. One random idea: maybe the link to the fan page should be a button in the Infobox instead of a random "click here" text link?
Also... let me know what you think of the Fan pages in general... are they cool? are we doing them right? what could we do better?
Thanks!
-Sean Colombo 22:58, February 7, 2011 (UTC)

Will every page get such a big space above the actual content? We are a serious lyrics page and not a cheap gossip rag. Do we need pinkish buttons and slideshows of lesbian-kisses? By the way, the twitter RSS feed is broken... Does any feed on this project work 24/7?!? - Chris 23:06, February 7, 2011 (UTC)

Will every page have a big space? Not if we don't want them to! :D ... I share the desire to have a minimal amount of space above the article before the discography starts. Also, I don't think the news feed makes sense on the artist page itself (especially if there is a Fan page)... but I do think it'd be cool to have some basic biographical info about artists (which we could expose through the API, ideally).

How does this sound? A == Background == section (or some similar name) at the bottom, and just a "Jump to Background [down arrow]" link at the top (possibly in the Infobox)?

Yeah, RSS feeds always seem jank on here... not sure what's up with that... will look for a bug case for that & file one if there isn't one yet.

Anyone got CSS/typography skillz they could use to make those buttons into pretty-looking text? ^^

Thanks for the feedbackz,

-Sean Colombo 23:31, February 7, 2011 (UTC)

YouTube videos on lyrics pages Edit

A very common request I hear is for youtube videos to be embedded on pages. The community has already done a great job of finding videos for a ton of songs. One challenge of embedding them might be that it could get in the way of the lyrics themselves. I think we have a good solution now by putting them off to the right (in line with the badges.. the same width as the badges).

Here are the three example pages that I tested on:

• Taio Cruz:Dynamite
• Ke$ha:We R Who We R
• Bruno Mars:Just The Way You Are

I think it makes sense to also keep the link in the footer. Thoughts?

Does that look good? Perhaps it would look better below the badges? Personally I think it's good where it is, but if you have strong thoughts either way, let me know.

Just wanted to see what everyone's thoughts were... then if it seems like a good idea, we could just have a bot scream through our pages and add the new link.
-Sean Colombo 01:18, January 12, 2011 (UTC)

I like the idea and having it among the badges looks good imho. But the necessity for another template is irritating as it leads to duplicit information (and yes, I aggree it should be kept in the footer). Nyoxi 02:30, January 12, 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm. The only way I can think of to do it w/out a template at the top also is to teach the <lyrics> tag to go back and fetch the wikitext of its entire page, then parse that to try to find the "youtube = " from the SongFooter. There are a few drawbacks to that:

1. Have to have the tag load the page-content (which is a little slower)
2. May be confusing because looking at the wikitext in approx. the place where you'd expect the video wouldn't show you any wikitext of how it's being generated (so you wouldn't necessarily no where to change it). This is probably a minor problem (like the first).
3. The only way to change things would be for me to change the code in the lyric parser-tag each time (so the community would have to wait for me each time instead of having the power to make the changes on their own).

None of those are deathly bad, but I don't like the last one very much since it slows down innovation in the future (if the community decides they want to improve something). Maybe there is another way to do it w/o duplicate info? Maybe we should just deal w/the duplicate info? Hmm. If we do end up having the extra embedding template at the top, we could probably have bots keep the top and the bottom in sync fairly easily, I think.

Additional thoughts are welcome. Right now, I'm leaning towards two templates.

-Sean Colombo 01:01, January 14, 2011 (UTC)

Unsure about YT vids on pages for various reasons.

• (+) Looks better and brings attention to our "service" of searching the YT vids
• (-) Videos are taken on and off YT all day long. A dead link doesn't make the project looking poorly maintained as much as a dead embedded video does
• (o) We should only allow official music videos for embedding and the others (f. e. song + slideshow + lyrics) only for linkage. I don't think these Windows Movie Maker videos are ones to embed
• (o) Will there be any way to be notified of removed vids?

About the problem: Why not make the embed template set a variable for the songfooter as with Wikipedia badge?

Chris 22:54, January 14, 2011 (UTC)

• That's a good point about the maintenance problems of making sure they're always there. Perhaps we could have a bot or cron-job which goes and checks the videos against the YouTube API to see if they're still up? That seems like a good way to make sure we get broken vids down in a timely manner.
• If Windows Movie Maker vids are the only available (which is the case for a lot of indies who don't have budgets for full-blown videos), personally I'd prefer that to not having a video at all. For songs which have both types of videos, I think that's okay someone can only find a bad video & the community eventually decides to replace it with a better one.
• Ah! Clever w/the variable idea.

-Sean Colombo 23:51, January 14, 2011 (UTC)

Not too many responses yet, but I think once the change is more visible (or watchlist emails start working again :P) more people will help us polish the experience. Here's a proposal for now:

1. We start botting to move the youtube ID from the footer to youtube embed tags. Anyone anxious to do this? If not, I'd be happy to bot it up soon.
2. We figure out a good way to make the SongFooter template fallback to a variable which gets set inside of {{youtube embed}} the same way that the {{wikipedia}} does it.
3. In the coming week or so, someone makes a bot which checks our YouTube videos to make sure they're still active and takes care of them (deletes them?) if they're gone. Anyone have experience with that already? If not, I can take a stab at it.

Seem reasonable? :)

-Sean Colombo 01:51, January 15, 2011 (UTC)

Also, Chris: which template sets the 'wpsong' variable? I see {{SongFooter}} use it, but I don't see {{Wikipedia}} or {{wplink}} use it.

-Sean Colombo 03:22, January 17, 2011 (UTC)

That would be {{WP-Song}}, which was created for use on song pages because {{Wikipedia}} didn't fit in nicely with the other badges. 6×9 (Talk) 06:56, January 17, 2011 (UTC)

Ahhh, cool. Thanks, 6!

I updated {{youtube embed}} to set the 'youtube' variable and updated {{SongFooter}} to use that variable if 'youtube' isn't provided. When I get a chance, I'll try to make a bot to start making changes.

-Sean Colombo 22:17, January 17, 2011 (UTC)

ÜberBot has started to update songs to have the new {{youtube embed}} instead of the parameter in the footer. There may be bugs in the way he's doing it - he tries to put the {{youtube embed}} below other templates that are known to need full width (such as {{Song}}, {{TranslatedSong}}, and {{WAY-Parody}}) but that almost certainly doesn't cover all the templates. For now he's running at one page every 30 seconds so that he doesn't cause too much damage if it turns out he's doing something wrong. If we don't see any problems for a few days, I'll speed him up. You can keep an eye on the changes here: Special:Contributions/ÜberBot

-Sean Colombo 21:11, January 18, 2011 (UTC)

Instead of looking where to put it below it might be better to check for the presence of any song badges (which, hopefully, are all shown in this category) and, if present, put it directly above them, else put it directly above the lyrics tag. This might also be a good strategy for the SOTD badge. 6×9 (Talk) 21:29, January 18, 2011 (UTC)

Hmm, good idea. Rewrote it. Now it hould appear above any of the badges listed on that page (or just the <lyrics> tag if none of them are present).

-Sean Colombo 21:49, January 18, 2011 (UTC)

Next to Chris I'm also not 100% excited about all u2bes embedding idea, but if ÜberBot started this process already, it would be desirable to include at least minimal validation of links being embedded. I don't think that page "Weird Al" Yankovic:Amish Paradise looks better now with such a 'video'. Eliminating dead-links or private/banned video's shouldn't be a problem for ÜberBot, using youtube api (responsing "Private video" in this case).

But what about all the rest u2bes, majority of which aren't real videos as such - just audio tracks, composed together with some set of pics (often very lowbrow pics, btw)? If I had a joice possibility, I'd like to have only minimized audio track control for such 'video', embeded on a page, maybe with optional possibility to maximize it to u2be video player control...

--Senvaikis ^(talk) 13:00, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

That'd be a cool idea to let us specify some videos to be audio-only. Anyone know of a way to do that?

-Sean Colombo 19:14, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

Btw, have you noticed some strange behaviour (periodical pseudogrowing) of Category:Invalid YouTube Link? Simple touching clears it again ('ve made that procedure twice today, over 40 pseudomembers on the last touch-cleaning). I suspected that may be somehow related to the process started by uBot, but page edition history doesn't confirm such assumption. 6? --Senvaikis ^(talk) 22:06, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

Probably the usual problem of variables and categories not playing nicely with each other. SF now checks not only for |youtube or |video parameters but also for yt variable, and if any is found calls {{YouTube}}. The latter checks if string length of id is 11, else it puts the page in C:IYL.

If the variable is not set it evaluates to an empty string, in which case {{YouTube}} isn't transcluded. But apparently it is parsed anyway, and while the page is displayed correctly (without C:IYL) the server somehow gets confused and adds it to the category. Next time such a "ghost" appears it might be worth checking whether it also shows up in Category:YouTube/Song. 6×9 (Talk) 22:21, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

(...Unindenting). Though this thread's grown enormously, wanted to ask ÜBot again - recheck the positioning (Leonard Cohen:First We Take Manhattan) and validation (Leonard Cohen:Democracy) of embeddements. tia --Senvaikis ^(talk) 15:54, January 24, 2011 (UTC)

The first one was my fault (in a way) since I advised Sean to put video above any badges, I didn't tell him to check whether those badges are positioned properly first :-)

I had to remove the youtube variable from {{SongFooter}}, since it caused Category:Invalid YouTube Link to grow, shrink and re-grow randomly. It's a bit weird to have the embedded video and a link to the same video on youtube anyway… 6×9 (Talk) 19:01, January 24, 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Additional comments to Democracy: don't know how does it looks on your computers, but on all 3 my boxes embeded control displays only message "Embedding disabled by request. Watch on YouTube." And indeed - the same video, disabled on LW page, is available on YouTube site for all my boxes. Then I checked this u2be feed with youtube api and found very interesting node in it's response: <yt:noembed/>... hth, --Senvaikis ^(talk) 19:09, January 24, 2011 (UTC)

@6:Yes, the reason of IYL growing remains unclear for me too, but not the shrinking - just senv/lwt used to touch this cat periodically, shrinking it that way...:). cheers, --Senvaikis ^(talk) 19:47, January 24, 2011 (UTC)

The initial moving of youtube templates is on "N" right now. My current plan is to write code to check the validity of youtube links as a separate task for ÜberBot. Thanks for reminding me Senv.... I don't want to put it off too long. Is there a category which tracks all songs with YouTube videos? I thought there was, but don't see it in the footer of the page or in {{SongFooter}} or {{Youtube}}.

Thanks for that tip about <yt:noembed/>!

-Sean Colombo 01:55, January 25, 2011 (UTC)

YouTube/Song, it's set in {{YouTube}}. 6×9 (Talk) 05:36, January 25, 2011 (UTC)

Returning to "only-audio" player option: we can't take only audio stream, but we can hide video part of player control using simple css or js (see an js-driven example). If {{youtube embed}} had a second parameter, determining the type (video/audio only) of control, that'd do the trick imo. cheers, --Senvaikis ^(talk) 20:49, January 25, 2011 (UTC)

See some tentative c:Y/S stats. --Senvaikis ^(talk) 15:19, January 29, 2011 (UTC)

Short heads up: before making further changes to SongFooter etc., we should wait for the queue load to be 6 digits again (currently 11.5 million pages in the queue, like each page 6 times). Last 3 days development (note that Y-axis isn't 0-based). - Chris 15:16, February 16, 2011 (UTC)

Wait… If a page that's already in the queue several times is re-built, won't it get removed from the queue completely, or at least skipped the next time it comes around? Because in that case it would be better to make any further changes now as long as most of them will have to be purged anyway. 6×9 (Talk) 15:26, February 16, 2011 (UTC)

All purge-jobs for a page are removed as soon as the first job for that page is done, that's true (I think the SQL query looks like DELETE FROM Queue WHERE page_id=$page_id). However, with that queue load, changing templates back and forth isn't sensible. For example, I think the youtube variables from {{youtube embed}} for {{SongFooter}} might have worked out if we had waited long enough until the queue is done and down to zero. You cannot tell whether a change really didn't work out until the queue is ready. - Chris 15:40, February 16, 2011 (UTC)

Actually, even though the documentation says it removes duplicates, I'm pretty sure that's not the case for one of the two types of jobs (the slow type). Since jobs are now stored in RANGES of id's to purge, I don't think it can do that (I didn't see anything in the code that goes through to slice up other ranges to take out the overlap). I wrote some code last summer to go through and remove all duplicates from the whole queue, but didn't get a chance to run it against our queue before it caught up. Might be worth trying it again.

Anywho, since we're so behind, I don't see any drawback to making changes now anyway. If the job runners aren't going to purge Cee Lo until Thursday, then when it's Thursday, they might as well generate the page in a completely-fixed way instead of what we have now. It makes sense to me to do the changes as soon as we know what we want to change. We can use action=purge on specific pages to test them and just do our best to get the job queue to catch up.

-Sean Colombo 03:00, February 17, 2011 (UTC)

Old search was bad, new search is worse Edit

As an example, I just searched for "Rivers of Babylon", a song that has been recorded by many artists. I got 8 results and none of the results included a link to a lyric page. The first result is to an artist page that contains a dead link for the song. If people come here looking for lyrics and that's how the search function works, they won't be coming back again. --Jomidi 01:45, January 13, 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, our search has serious issues. When I search for "Rivers of Babylon" I get lyrics pages as the top links. http://screencast.com/t/WDZ5xjTK If you search now, do you get the same thing I got, or still get a link to an artist page at the top?

Very strange. Please let me know what you get.. thanks!

-Sean Colombo 00:51, January 14, 2011 (UTC)

Now I get what you got, but I wouldn't call the results ideal. There are six sets of lyrics to the song on this site that I know of, but search returns only two lyrics pages. Every page on the site whose title contains the words "rivers of babylon" should be in my search results. At least six such pages aren't being returned. There may be more than six.

This is a great site, but it's pretty much useless if the search function doesn't return the page I want if it exists. If I were looking specifically for the Steve Earle version of the song (which exists on the site), I'd leave and go to another lyric site when I didn't see it in the search results.

I hate to think of all the people that don't use the site because they've searched for lyrics and not found what they want when, in fact, what they want exists on the site.--Jomidi 01:35, January 17, 2011 (UTC)

Ick. The unfortunate fact is that this both 1) needs to be fixed and 2) isn't easy to fix. Moving this conversation to my talk page so I don't lose track of or forget it. Please update there if you have more feedback.

Thanks for the feedback,

-Sean Colombo 22:02, February 1, 2011 (UTC)

GracenoteBot doing his thing Edit

That wiley rascal is at it again. Adding, changing, deleting, and restoring. Feel free to keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn't get out of line ;)
-Sean Colombo 00:53, January 14, 2011 (UTC)

Auto-Following? Edit

...nevermind. Redrkr 05:02, January 14, 2011 (UTC)

Does anyone speak Norwegian? Edit

Could someone who speaks Norwegian finish transcribing this short track?

Here is the link to the page: http://lyrics.wikia.com/Danielson:Pretty

and here is the link to it on Grooveshark: http://listen.grooveshark.com/s/Pretty/wOaNC?src=5

Thanks! Andersol 00:25, January 29, 2011 (UTC)

Edit: It is complete, thanks!

Caps Check Edit

So I'm curious- how does a song come off the Caps Check list? Other than being moved if it didn't match the policy? Might make it easier to get through to the ones that really need help if the ones that don't need it are out of the way. NYCScribbler 21:54, February 1, 2011 (UTC)

If you're referring to Caps Check, that didn't work out – somehow, every page ended up in that category, and while purging removed the false positives, after a while they crept back in. I removed the responsible code a while ago; eventually it should clear out by itself. Best just ignore it :-) 6×9 (Talk) 14:47, February 2, 2011 (UTC)

I'm running external code that works with the API to find at least Latin script based songs that do not comply with LW:PN. The last run however was 29 August 2010. Run 6 was always auto-aborted in the middle of category C. My dumpfiles do not reveal the reason. I'll try it once again though. However there are many pages to be merged by hand. Furthermore even the non-Latin based songs are recorded and we might be able to identify them, as most artists should have there name romanized in parantheses. Still sad that Delphi does not appear to be able to handle UTF. Still testing/trying/working on it... - Chris 23:57, February 2, 2011 (UTC)

What are the conventions for handling guest artists? Edit

Elvis Costello#Other Songs has Elvis Costello:Adrian, which is weird, because it's the same lyrics as Eurythmics:Adrian, which is definitely and only written by Lennox/Stuart (the Eurythmics), but indeed Elvis does sing on it.

I modified both song pages to add the attributes fa=Annie Lennox|fa2=Elvis Costello, but I have some questions that aren't addressed by the FAQ.

• Presumably the criteria for listing a song under a performer is if he or she sings its lyrics, but where do you draw the lines? Michael McDonald sings background vocals on a bunch of Steely Dan songs, but they're not listed on his page. Other songs explicitly feature an instrumentalist like Slash, do you add such performers to the song? Do you list these songs under Slash?
• Based on the wikipedia:DRY ("Don't Repeat Yourself") principle, surely you don't want to duplicate identical lyrics on separate pages "under" (as in "following a colon") multiple performers?! I would have thought the Elvis Costello page should just have a link to Eurythmics:Adrian, maybe using a {{featured on}} template that produces
  Is a featured artist on Adrian by Eurythmics
  Yet e.g. Michael McDonald#Other Songs has a lot of similar repetitions, duplicating a bunch of The Doobie Brothers songs under Michael McDonald, and stupidly(?) the Michael McDonald:Songname pages don't even indicate that the songs all come from Doobie Brothers albums. Is this an accident of automation, or a policy?
• Hmm, Michael McDonald:What A Fool Believes does a redirect to the Doobie Brothers song. That's another approach, but I think my proposal to indicate on his page that he's singing on a Doobie Brothers song, with a direct link to the The Doobie Brothers:What A Fool Believes song, is better than a redirect.

What you/we ought to be doing is use the wonders of wikipedia:Semantic MediaWiki to put a [[Featured_artist:Elvis Costello]] property on the one song page under the main artist, and then each artist's page can query for all the songs on which this artist is featured. For some value of "ought", of course ;-)

Thanks for thoughts and suggestions, and pointers to existing discussion and explanation. -- Skierpage 03:57, February 12, 2011 (UTC)

Yes, most if not all of what you're seeing goes in the "accident of automation" category. Many of the lyrics here were originally scraped from other sites by a bot program, and sometimes, those sites have incorrect artist names and/or song titles. And you're most likely to see those having ended up under Other Songs, since they haven't been assigned to an album (because they can't be).

The preferred way to handle an incorrect artist name and/or song title is by redirecting to the correct page -- that's what should be done with any songs listed on Michael McDonald's page that are actually Doobie Brothers songs. Unless he redid them for a solo album, in which case they should stay and have the {{Cover}} template added (plus the name of the album, and so on and so forth). That's also what should be done with the Elvis Costello page for "Adrian."

Since the fa= template results in the specific label "featured," I definitely wouldn't use it in the case of Michael McDonald singing backup for Steely Dan -- since this is really supposed to be a lyrics site and not necessarily a complete encyclopedic discography and biography, I think the question to ask is, would anyone be trying to look up, let's say, "Reeling in the Years" under Michael McDonald?

I'd also say to not put Annie Lennox as a "featured artist" on any Eurythmics songs -- it's redundant, since she's a member of the band. (Same deal with Michael McDonald on Doobie Brothers songs.) But I think Elvis Costello definitely would count as "featured" on "Adrian."

For someone who only plays an instrument on a song, I'd say they'd only count as a "featured artist" if they're seriously featured, such as having a bunch of guitar solos, for example (would probably be the case with Slash). Otherwise, they can just be listed in a "credits" section underneath the lyrics.

As for listing someone's "featured" appearances on their artist page, I believe the best way to do that currently is with the collabs= parameter within the {{ArtistInfo}} template -- see Cat Power, which I recently edited, for an example. Cat Power doesn't use it, but ArtistInfo also has parameters that allow for showing that someone is a member of, or a former member of, a group -- so on the Michael McDonald page, you'd merely indicate there that he was a member of Doobie Brothers, rather than listing every Doobie Brothers song he sang on. (ArtistInfo is fairly new, so you may see many artist pages still using an older template, {{RelatedArtists}}, which doesn't provide as much information.)

I don't know anything about Semantic MediaWiki, so I have no opinion about that.

Hope this all made sense to you. I'm happy to clarify further if necessary (or someone else may chime in with a second opinion on some of the things I've said...). Trainman 08:07, February 12, 2011 (UTC)

Our confusing system of help pages Edit

Hi there, I don't know if I'm the only one, but with LyricWiki being such a complex project with many specialities it's a logical consequence that we have to have a lot of help pages. But: they are all somewhat "incomplete" and I feel like they are scattered across the whole project and it's hard to find them all. So I dream about a new project for me, as all mass edit tasks I could perform with Greasemonkey currently seem to be done for me so far: donating LyricWiki a new help-page system, with more structure and unified appearance. This does not mean I will like erase everything we have and then rewrite all the help pages completely. I just thought about gathering all the help pages together and then order them into a more intuitive way.

At the moment, we have so many different pages, all about some of the help topics, but none of them gathers them all:

• Help:Contents + its subpages - General overview about editing, also some very specific information; partially overlapping with some template documentations
• Help:Advanced - A forgotten page, not up to date (basically created 3 years ago ); very specific, much overlapping with other non-helppages (which I can't find atm)
• Help:FAQ - Just very few very specific questions, could be enhanced by more periodical updates
• LyricWiki:Help Desk - Should be the place where people ask about editing
• LyricWiki:Site support - Sounds like a helppage, but it's intended to contain how to support the site. Yet, there is a complete Help:Contents... again? Weird!
• LyricWiki:Helpcenter - My approach of creating a base for all helppages; just a demonstration, not working the desired way, not as effective as I hoped to, is it? What do you think about the method of "click-the-fitting"?
• LyricWiki talk:Community Portal - Usually just for feedback, but a wild mixture of feedback, talk and questions
• LyricWiki:User preferences help - Umm, yeah, currently a spam page, but maybe needed (?)
• LyricWiki:Job Exchange - Help with edits you can't do alone (works great lately, more than 30 requests in the last month, trend (hopefully) upwards, will be enhanced and continued, I think? )
• Place to report bugs - missing so far
• Many questions on (admin) talkpages and the corresponding archives, which is nothing bad, but some of them might be worth to be gathered together into the help
• Template documentations - not always present as subpage (or none doc at all), not unified, some badly connected to the concerning helppages Templates names and usage isn't always intuitive as well (Cover + Covered/Cover2), but that's another point
• Category:Help - Pretty useless at the moment, seriously. Please compare description to content.

If you agree to my plan to recreate a more unified and less splitted/scattered/confusing help system, I would start

1. to unify template doc's first. What do you think about the way like I thought off for {{SongHeader}} (the "better" {{Song}} template ) to link the attributes to the sections?
2. to rebuild Help:Contents' subpages, likely with the use of the installed extension "TabView", so we need one page for "Formatting" and then have tabs for Artist/Album/Song etc, so we needn't put hundreds of links down into the lowest level of subpages.
3. find (or even better create) some example pages as reference for how pages should look like (we could use my test-artist "Big The Boss" and his made-up discography).
4. gather/sort information from other help- and talkpages and sort them into the FAQ or the Help where sensible.
5. improve internal system of categories collecting helppages.

Are you in? - Chris 00:35, February 15, 2011 (UTC)

Proposal: make this a REAL lyrics website. Edit

Ladies and Gentlemen of The Interwebz, there are thousands of Lyrics websites over there; and this is not much better than them. I have a proposal to make this a Lyrics Wiki to Rule Them All. Wanna know?

Annotations

Most musicians talk about important stuff in their lyrics. Stuff that not everybody knows. The entry for Welcome to the Jungle could add information about Las Vegas. Yellow Submarine could tell you something about opium in India. Black_Sabbath:Paranoid is ranked as Gold Star. It could tell you that the song was composed in 20 minutes because the album was considered too anti-war by the producer. That kind of stuff would add value to the site. For example, Compare Iron_Maiden:The_Trooper with this Iron Maiden web. They give you 4 paragraphs of history about the Crimean War and a poem by Lord Tennyson. That makes you understand the lyrics' full meaning. I know that most american music that reaches my country is "teenagers in love" with flat simple lyrics; but surely there must be a few good songwriters left over there; so this benefits everybody.

It would make a huge difference.

Regards, Anonymous 186.109.12.201 15:15, February 17, 2011 (UTC)

Hey, first about Iron Maiden: you are comparing us (a collection of 1.1 million songs by more than 40,000 different artists) to a webpage specialised on Iron Maiden. That is like comparing the wikipedia article about planes to Boeing's archives of all their blueprints! Of course we do not have that density of information. How could we?

"It could tell you that the song was composed in 20 minutes because the album was considered too anti-war by the producer."

That's interesting, though I don't know what the one has to do with the other, and I also wonder where you get such information. Furthermore I doubt this information helps to understand the song's meaning.

Yet we do accept if not encourage to provide additional information whenever we have it, for example here or even a complete page here. I cannot remember any case where we had ever deleted relevant additional information on purpose. Therefore feel free to add the annotations section to every song you like!

Regards, Chris 16:04, February 17, 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Chris... if you're passionate about additional info or annotations, get to it :) Here are a couple more examples of pages that have decent additional info:

• Tool:Lateralus/Fibonacci
• The Clarks:Born Too Late

Please jump right in and start sprucing up pages you'd like to, and as you add more Additional Info, it might start a trend :)

Thanks,

-Sean Colombo 18:41, February 17, 2011 (UTC)

Ok, I've signed up. I'll start with some international bands --Abaldrich 01:09, February 24, 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. - Chris 17:45, February 24, 2011 (UTC)

With regard to annotations, I think there should be a difference between these lyric pages and the Wikipedia song pages that they're linked to. I wouldn't be so interested in production notes of the songs here so much as lyrical meaning. Of course, I'd have to also suggest that these annotations have some reference requirement. Sounds fun, but a lot of work. Redrkr 00:54, February 25, 2011 (UTC)

Title 'All Start Capitals' ?

I got a complaint wanting to name an album as on the cover picture Boudewijn De Groot:Voor de Overlevenden (1966) as is usual in Dutch.

Now I changed it to the 'wrong' "De". No big deal, but unusual and different from the cover picture... ClubFavolosa 23:02, March 8, 2011 (UTC)

Insensitivity! (case insensitivity that is) Edit

Because we use MediaWiki, we have case-sensitive titles. This leads us to tons of redirects and very specific naming conventions. However, this also makes it unnecessarily hard for people to search our site (even using the API or the LyricWiki Android App).

My question is this: do we have any real need to allow two pages with different capitalization to exist? If not, we could usher in a new age of freedom on LyricWiki :P ... all capitalization could be how it is in the original song/album/artist and we could just make the site prevent duplicate names that vary only by capitalization.

We'd have to write an extension to enforce this, but it could be done and we could probably merge all of the existing conflicts in one night (assuming there aren't any VALID reasons to have two pages differ only in case).

This strikes me as being worth it even if an artist were to release the same song w/different capitalization, it's probably worth having a disambiguation page for that song rather than to make our whole system case-sensitive.

Can anyone think of a reason NOT to do this? Any thoughts in favor of it?

Thanks!
-Sean Colombo 22:39, March 12, 2011 (UTC)

Does the system not only prevent pages from being created but also redirect differently capitalized pageviews to the one page?

Situation

• "THiS iS a WeiRDLY CaPiTaLiZeD PaGe" is created
• "This is a Weirdly Capitalized Page" is blocked
• "This is a Weirdly Capitalized Page" is called

Does it silently lead the user to the existing "THiS..." page then? Otherwise songs could never be found again... - Chris 00:11, March 13, 2011 (UTC)

Good eye ;) ...yeah, we could definitely do auto-redirects in the same general way we do "Implied Redirects" now. In addition even though "This is a Weirdly Capitalized Page" is blocked from creation, you could "move" (rename) the old page TO be that page if desired. Both of those cases should def. be covered.

It's kinda frightening that this seems like such a good idea... we might actually have to do it! Oh nos! ;D

-Sean Colombo 01:38, March 13, 2011 (UTC)

Won't moving to a differently capitalised page cause trouble? Because we'd end up with two pages, only one of which would be allowed. So the system would have to detect whether only caps are changed, and only in that case not leave a redirect behind.

But that would also break any links to the original page… unless links were made case-insensitive as well, so for example [[aBbA]] would link to ABBA without an explicit redirect.

Other than that, I see no major problem, and it would simplify a lot of things. — 6×9 (Talk) 08:45, March 13, 2011 (UTC)

"we could definitely do auto-redirects in the same general way we do "Implied Redirects" now."

I don't know if I'm forgetting about something, but how shall this be performed? Is there a way to perform ci database searches? If not, the system would have to cover all possibilities, which is approx. "2^length" possibilities for each title: abba, abbA, abBa, abBA, aBba, aBbA, aBBa, aBBA, Abba, AbbA, AbBa, AbBA, ABba, ABbA, ABBa, ABBA

You cannot perform 16 searches for "Abba", until you finally find "ABBA". And this is only 4 letters long. Imagine a search ‎on "Watch Tower Bible And Tract Society:Sing Praises To Jehovah (1994)" - this is 50 alpha-chars = ~ 1 quadrillion possibilities... - Chris 15:42, March 13, 2011 (UTC)

I would most likely be accomplishing this stuff by adding another column to the "page" table which has a case-folded version of the title. This would make moving, preventing duplicates, and auto-redirecting all pretty straightforward.

- Sean (can't get tildes to work in this box on my mobile, lol) Sean Colombo 20:15, March 13, 2011 (UTC)

Well, despite the fact that I generaly am agains such stuff and I require capitalisation everywhere, in this situation i think it complicates things more then helps. So I do support this proposal. I just hope it won't mean that we drop the naming rules completly (only some will become suggestions and not rules maybe). Either to avoid complete capitalisation anarchy and also to give guide in situations when the correct capitalisation isn't known (e.g. cd cover with all names in upercase or some such).Nyoxi 20:29, March 16, 2011 (UTC)

It looks like it's worth taking a shot at this. I've started a technical todo list here: User:Sean_Colombo/Case_Insensitivity. Please let me know if I've missed an obvious case that we should be covering.
Thanks!
-Sean Colombo 00:17, March 27, 2011 (UTC)

Yay! A bunch of the most popular banned songs are coming back! Edit

It appears that Gracenote got licensing for a bunch of popular artists that had previously been on the takedown list such as Queen, Aerosmith, and Michael Jackson.

GracenoteBot is churning away, adding back what he can. If there are pages that have been modified since they were added to the takedown list, he often can't automatically revert so he adds them to Category:Restorable_Pages_Needing_Attention which will probably be growing a decent amount over the next day or so and might need some extra love.

I'm pretty pumped to have these back :D it's like Christmas in March!
-Sean Colombo 03:06, March 14, 2011 (UTC)

Quick note: I ran a bunch of update files and then ended up being run more in parallel than in order. This caused some songs to go off the takedown list, then back on and vice-versa. Basically, GracenoteBot is going to have to start over from yesterday so he may be making some confusing edits. Long-story short: he may appear confused, but everything that happens from right now going forward should be correct.

Sorry for the confusion!

-Sean Colombo 03:23, March 14, 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for good news, Sean! So, the answer to my question is: "restorable"? --Senvaikis ^(talk) 14:00, March 14, 2011 (UTC)

@ all (not everyone can be that firm in all the terms as we are): when GNB took down the pages it protected them. Now, that they are to be back, most pages will not have been changed since the takedown, but some might. In order to not destroy any changes, GNB will not revert its changes, because that'd revert all changes made inbetween, too. Therefore, the page is put into the "Restorable Pages Needing Attention" category.

Senv: from what I got, I think yes . Let's see what Sean's about to tell us.

Sean: Yay, MJ is back! - Chris 17:41, March 14, 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict)@Chris: seems 6 has a different opinion... --Senvaikis ^(talk) 18:31, March 14, 2011 (UTC)

Responded to Senv on GNBot page.

LWChris: If we also get Tool and APC back, I think I can die happy ;)

-Sean Colombo 18:22, March 14, 2011 (UTC)

Some stats about current situation in RPNA:

87 songs are still protected (though containing {{gn_restore}}). Lwt didn't touch them for a while. Remaining 133 lyrics could be restored to pre-gn state, but 127 of them have accented chars, thus simple restoring is hook-aborted by spam-filter. So, Lwt did all what it could atm - restored remaining six unprotected & unhooked songs ;). Actually Lwt would be able to restore all these songs lyrics to other, taken from GN, value. But I'm not sure about legitimacy of such "restoring".

Any thoughts? --Senvaikis ^(talk) 11:00, March 17, 2011 (UTC)

Those protected pages with restore template which I checked were re-protected, but gn_restore wasn't removed. So I'd guess the way to handle these would be to remove said template. Correct, Sean?

Accented pages: overwriting all of these with GN versions wouldn't be a good idea, because not all GN pages have correct accents – some have "flattened" lyrics with ascii characters only. But if lwt can check for presence of non-ascii and only overwrite in such a case, that should be fine. — 6×9 (Talk) 14:36, March 17, 2011 (UTC)

...and you are sure - any problems with GN:EULA? --Senvaikis ^(talk) 16:05, March 17, 2011 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, copying any amount of lyrics from the GN namespace anywhere else on LW should be fine, since it's not "copy[ing ...] to any third party". Didn't GNB originally intend to create main NS pages for any added GN page anyway? — 6×9 (Talk) 18:10, March 17, 2011 (UTC)

Album of the Week Edit

Why has the same AOTW been on the front page for ages although there are other nominations in the queue?--91.49 22:28, March 14, 2011 (UTC)

Because the user who cared about the nominations left LyricWiki and we haven't found someone yet who is willing to do this job weekly. - Chris 22:28, March 14, 2011 (UTC)

Then wouldn't it be better to at least remove the current AOTW from the front page until someone comes along who takes care of things again? It looks rather stupid IMHO if the same AOTW appears there forever.--91.49 22:49, March 14, 2011 (UTC)

Was my proposal, too. I'll ask again to remove it. - Chris 20:30, March 17, 2011 (UTC)

I'm taking care of AOTW currently. If you want to nominate an album, go ahead. :) - hard4me 23:37, November 25, 2011 (UTC)

Add more than one artist to a song Edit

Hi,

I would like to know how I can add more than one artist to a song. I can't find the answer in the FAQ. For example at this song: Duck Dich (Juice Exclusive). They are four single artists, but I can't name one by one in the description. So how can I do that? - (Optikus 17:17, April 1, 2011 (UTC))

The way you made it is correct. Now create a page for the combined artist, put the song into the Other songs section and put the Collaboration template on it. And that's basically how it's done, as far as I know. - Chris 23:07, April 1, 2011 (UTC)

Well, thank you. But that is not really the thing I meant. I meant something at that code: {Song|Name Of Artist|star=Colour}}. So that you can read: "This song is performed by Jonesmann, Blaze, Criz & Haftbefehl. Is there an opportunity to do that? - Optikus 11:48, April 2, 2011 (UTC)

This is, as you stated correctly, impossible, because the template has nothing like artist2 parameter or so. See this song how it's done. It's the easiest way to provide a link to both artists. - Chris 12:24, April 2, 2011 (UTC)

Ok thank you. So I will do it that way. By the way, will the template be changed, so that it will be possible to add a second or more artists? - Optikus 15:03, April 2, 2011 (UTC)

No I don't think so, because otherwise the code will get very complex. Single links but all together for Album, ARTIST keyword, SongFooter etc. - that's too complex compared to the number of pages that system would be useful for. - Chris 18:10, April 2, 2011 (UTC)

Well, I understand. Thank you. - Optikus 18:38, April 2, 2011 (UTC)

You can use the "featured artist" parameters, |fa=Second Artist| fa2=Third Artist parameters to {{Song}} to append "and features Second Artist and Third Artist". You still have to pick one artist to "own" the song. I guess the other artists could have redirects to it. This quickly devolves into "How can I show all songs on which "Third Artist" performs?, to which the one true best answer is the Semantic MediaWiki extension. -- Skierpage 20:55, April 2, 2011 (UTC)

Well, I don't think so. I have used the featured artist parameter very often here. But sometimes you can't use it because nobody featured the other. It is simply a collaboration as Chris said it. So I have done it that way. Nevertheless, I thank you for answering. - Optikus 12:58, April 3, 2011 (UTC)

To Skierpage: The problem with SMW is that it is computationally intensive and its database operations produce a lot of load to the servers. Even for smaller wikis than LW the load exceeds the performance limit of Wikia's servers to run fluent and without lags. The link-web of millions of pages is just too complex for SMW.

Anyway I don't see the necessity to use SMW when there is Special:WhatLinksHere. A search on Lil Wayne (you may need to filter the namespace and set the limit to 500) also throws OutKast:Hollywood Divorce as result #142 for example, which is a song where Lil Wayne occured as featured artist. - Chris 13:27, April 3, 2011 (UTC)

Don't dampen my idealism with practical issues 8-) I don't want to hijack this heading, but the key idea of SMW is to explain to the wiki "Why is the link Lil Wayne here?" and "Why is the value 3:42 here?". WhatLinksHere can't tell you. At least templates capture the information until computers become powerful enough. Cheers -- Skierpage 20:57, April 3, 2011 (UTC)

*giggles* Sorry, I tried really hard but I just can't keep that comment any longer: It's fine that the wiki knows why Lil Wayne's linked, but nobody else would ever make profit of it or even find it out here, because the servers would crash all the time with that amount of pages and data... eehhrrg, fail - Chris 02:41, April 26, 2011 (UTC)

Try out Live Chat on LyricWiki? Edit

I've been working on the Live Chat system for Wikia for a while, and it's up and running on a few wikis now (mostly the ones that requested it. If you are logged in, there should be a button in the right-rail to join the chat on any of those wikis, such as Glee Wiki.

We have an IRC channel right now, but a very small minority of people have IRC or are willing to install it just for one room. I think it's worth a try to flick on Special:Chat for LyricWiki and see how it goes.

Does anyone see any problems with trying it out? I'll probably flick it on tomorrow (Monday) if there isn't a reason not to.

Thanks,
-Sean Colombo 23:33, April 24, 2011 (UTC)

LyricWiki Admin Log April 26 11 - The day before yesterday, BM informed us on a new engine the page got, hopefully attracting more people to sector Charlie Hotel Alpha Tango which lately had some problems due to underserving. The new engine isn't an externally developed model type but a derivative of the special page superclass. As recent maintanance work is managable cadett Chris had some time on his hands to perform a simple engine test on the new machine in the sector. But today, the engine room reserved for the new machine is still empty or not functionally attached to the rest of the page. The boardcomputer at the entrace throws an error 404 not found. Captain Sean was informed, we'll see if is able to activate the machine again by the end of this week with his ÜberHax keystrokes. We don't know what it'll lead to, but there's no turning back.

Chris 03:00, April 26, 2011 (UTC) with Star Trek

Chat engaged ;) look on the right rail for the entry-portal -Sean Colombo 07:20, April 26, 2011 (UTC)

New Sidebar Element Being Tested Edit

Hello,

I wanted to give you a heads-up about a new sidebar unit we are experimenting with on Wikia. We've been looking again at our Answers websites, and have just redesigned them to have a similar look to other wikis, and to make it easier to match the theme to a similar regular wiki.

Next we would like to point people toward a wiki’s corresponding answers site via a box on the right hand rail of the wiki, similar to the Recent Activity box.

This box is a bit like the the Answers widget we introduced last year, but is simpler and just shows a list of questions recently asked or answered on the corresponding answers site, much like one would expect to see on “Wiki Activity” if one were actually on the answers site. For this test, the box would only show to logged-out users.

We've chosen wikis with plenty of activity and an Answers wiki on the same subject - ut if we've chosen the wrong Answers Wiki to link to please let us know. If you are logged out, and see the “Recent Questions” box, feel free to give us your feedback! --daNASCAT (help forum | blog) 18:49, May 4, 2011 (UTC)

Remixes Edit

When it comes to remixes, there are no guidelines (at least that I could find) spelled out. The biggest issue is that I, as a contributor, do not know if each remix should always/never have its own page or if its difference from the original is a factor (and if so, how different a remix should be in order to have its own page). I've had conflicting answers to this question - Trainman says different remixes can have different pages even if lyrics are only slightly different, but Ssmodk says there should only be one page. Personally, I think (at least as a general rule), each version of a song should have its own page regardless of how similar it is to the original lyrically since iTunes/Amazon/Musicbrainz/whatever will typically recognize each version as a separate song and since it prevents people arguing over which set of lyrics belongs on the page. Is there a consensus on this? IAmTheClaw 10:47, June 13, 2011 (UTC)

Another approach is to compare the different version's suitablility for the goal of LyricWiki: to provide lyrics to sing along the songs. Then a remix needs its own page as soon as it's becoming difficult to keep track where you are. For example, if there's one line at the end repeated once more because the fade out is slower, I'd not create a page for that. But just today I resurrected the Paul Oakenfold Remix of Elvis Presley's Rubberneckin' because the lyrics have a completely different layout and order. It's impossible to keep all that in mind. This is how I do it, but I can't tell what's the "wanted" rule. We'll have to ask Sean. - Chris 01:20, June 15, 2011 (UTC)

At least with the remixes I encounter in the industrial/EBM genre, remixes generally have a different order, but differ much more in the instrumental aspect than lyrically. It's also not uncommon to encounter a remix that has added lyrics (typically samples rather than actual vocals, though). There's even one I know of that changes the main lyrics from generated speech to actual vocals (and in a different language). And them there's the matter of original versions having different mixes by the same artists, with all of them having parenthetical notes (Suicide Commando is pretty notorious for this). IAmTheClaw 01:35, June 15, 2011 (UTC)

MusicBrainz "release-group" in AlbumFooter? Edit

If this sounds like something you're interested in, please join the discussion on MusicBrainz release-groups in LyricWiki Album footers.
Thanks! :)
-Sean Colombo 23:45, June 13, 2011 (UTC)

I posted a new proposal in the discussion to allow linking only to release groups (and to mass-convert all existing release MBIDs). What do you think? TarkinTor 23:03, June 15, 2011 (UTC)

ÜberBot is gettin' down to biznass Edit

He's been getting antsy and wanting to make more stuff! He's starting another small batch, but as always there are lots of things that aren't perfect since he's a robot (he may be creating pages which are just variants of CORRECT titles that we already have, etc.), so if you have the time/inclination, please keep an eye on ÜberBot to help keep him coloring in the lines ;)
Thanks!
-Sean Colombo 04:52, June 26, 2011 (UTC)

• Just had a peek at his batch. Some characters, like the typographic apostrophe, seem to be garbled (like Elvis Presley:Your Love’s Been A Long Time Coming) --BryghtShadow ^talk _works 20:38, June 26, 2011 (UTC)

Searching namespaces Edit

So I have a yen to redirect things that a bot can't catch. One typo I've noticed is the use of ` (that little key up on the left side of the average keyboard) instead of ' (over on the right). Is there any way to search for a page whose name contains that character? (Or any character/set of characters, really.) NYCScribbler 01:55, July 20, 2011 (UTC)

Using accents or smart quotes instead of apostrophes is one of the most common "errors", besides to the special quotation marks. My AutoFix script fixes these: ’´`‘ to ' and „“”«» to ". However this applies to the lyrics, not to the page titles. You could use the API with list=allpages and filter the output with something like grep. Can you do this or shall I provide you with a formated list (tell me how you need it then)? - Chris 05:09, July 20, 2011 (UTC)

Spam filter Edit

I've tried to create a page Eddie Constantine:Wenn Liebe auf der Welt regiert. Lyrics only: no external links, but it was blocked by the spam filter. What shall I do now? --eugrus 10:39, August 2, 2011 (UTC)

Besides that due to our page naming conventions the page should be titled "Eddie Constantine:Wenn Liebe Auf Der Welt Regiert", exactly the same happened for me yesterday. It worked out for me on the second try, so I'd recommend to simply try adding the song again. - Chris 13:14, August 2, 2011 (UTC)

If trying to add the song again doesn't work, following the directions on the spam filter page -- which involve posting on a talk page elsewhere on Wikia -- will work, although you may have to wait a day or two. (I believe a Wikia administrator has to manually add an exception to the filter.) I've occasionally had this problem for pages with the word "best" in the title, which you may realize is not an uncommon word to find in album titles. Trainman 17:29, August 2, 2011 (UTC)

From experience I know that usually the problem isn't the content but some URL anywhere on the page (e. g. in advertisements) that is accidentially matching a regular expression in the blacklists. Given that AFAIK Wikia uses so-called ad-rotators that display different ads for every pageview it is mere chance whether the edit is accepted or blocked. - Chris 19:00, August 2, 2011 (UTC)

That is pretty ridiculous! Such capitalization of titles is a part of English orthography. Titles in languages other than English should not be forced to use the orthography of English. --eugrus 19:40, October 7, 2011 (UTC)

I think you're referring to the page naming conventions? Well, actually, they are not even English, because in English, titles would not have the words "The", "Of", "From", etc. written inicaps.

I guess you are not a programmer, so I can understand that this looks very "ridiculous" to you. But as a matter of fact, it is the only way to make sure that absolutely everyone in the world knows how the titles are written. We cannot suppose every developer to know that "Liebe" and "Welt" are nouns and therefore are capitalized. Furthermore it avoids duplicate content and discussions about how titles are written, and not only computers can quick-check whether we have certain content or not. - Chris 16:19, October 9, 2011 (UTC)

Song Of The Day Edit

I nominated a song ages ago, as always with nicely written reasons for my nomination. It hasn't turned up yet. I guess with the new interface it's just too easy now to nominate a song. The problem is, that a lot of nominations contain poor reasoning as for why the song is nominated. Things like "I don't know why this song should not be SOTD". It's just a pity, because someone like me won't write another nomination under these circumstances. You know, at Wikipedia they have understood that it is important that what appears on the home page is of good quality. Just some food for thought.--91.49 22:21, August 14, 2011 (UTC)

I do see your nomination in the queue, so don't worry, it'll show up eventually. You're right that we do have a fairly big queue -- we're a couple of months behind on songs that don't have a preferred date.

Recognizing that they do end up on the front page, we do reject songs with nomination reasons that are too short, or too incoherent, and we do edit nomination reasons for spelling/grammar/punctuation. However, since we want to be inclusive and allow a wide variety of songs, artists, and ideas, we don't really have a problem with nominations of the "I nominated this song because it's awesome" variety. Trainman 22:43, August 14, 2011 (UTC)

It's my particular concern to affirm that every nomination will be at least looked at. Furthermore I want to explain why there's still some of these ultra-short nominations that don't even get above the 50 char limit: in the time before the new interface was written, there was a chronical lack of nominations. Therefore some nominations made before the 50-char lower limit was introduced and that were at least suitable have been confirmed as such. Now, I don't want to reject nominations that were already marked suitable, because in my understanding of marking them suitable that is like a promise, and it'd be unfair to say "yes" and then reject it later just because others are better.

Now to why those still appear: Although we're really trying to, we're not absolutely pulling submissions in the order they were committed. The reason is that we try to mix those short-reasoned nominations with the detailed ones, to hold a certain quality level in average. This is why there are still many of those short ones. This will decrease by time. Since April, there have been over 700 nominations, of which at least 50% were good and suitable. I'm really sorry that this makes good nominations wait so long, but I promise that every nomination that's matching our criteria (not already SOTD, media ids and good reason) will finally be accepted and pulled to be SOTD. Please don't refrain from submitting new songs, it will get better by the time.

I wish there was a way to speed up, but as we're currently at an average of two or three new nominations per day we'd have to reject 50-66% of the incoming nominations, which is not what I want to do. I hope you understand. Greetings, Chris 01:04, August 15, 2011 (UTC)

Okay, meanwhile it's still that much songs, so I will remove the banner for now and see what that does to the rating. If that doesn't help, it's maybe time to raise the limit to 120 characters to find out who's really trying to make a good submission. Usual reasons should have no problem to beat that limit, especially if the nominations contain wiki markup like a link to an album or the genre. Write "a cool [[:Category:Gerne/Rock|rock]] song" instead of "a cool rock song" and you've got 25 characters more, and raised the quality of the nomination. Every suitable link is a good link. - Chris 22:21, October 2, 2011 (UTC)

Gracenote takedown on songs without lyrics Edit

I am sorry if this was already asked. I tried looking and could not find anything on the subject.

On a few of the songs, they are nothing more than the "Instrumental" tag. However, the Gracenote lyric takedown was applied to these pages. If a song does not have lyrics, should it be subject to the Gracenote lyric takedown? M.A.X. 17:35, August 27, 2011 (UTC)

Hi M.A.X.,

Gracenote takedowns are illogical from time to time, it's just like that (if I made a top 10 list of the most nonsensical takedown titles you'd probably be laughing till you cry. ). Yet there's nothing we can do about it, takedowns have to be applied and revoked as Gracenote specifies. But anyway, how do these pages look like? Does "Instrumental tag" mean they have the {{Instrumental}} template above the takedown note, could you link to an example? If the Instrumental template is visible, a takedown is maybe annoying but not really a loss, is it? - Chris 05:18, August 28, 2011 (UTC)

Chris,

The pages I noticed it the most on were the ones for Tool. Here is one page. The Instrumental template is not visible, only the Gracenote takedown template. If the page actually said "Instrumental", then had the Gracenote takedown template language, I would not really care, but as you can see, that is not the case. --M.A.X. 16:57, September 11, 2011 (UTC)

Ah, okay, thanks for the example! Well, I'll have to ask Sean whether edits like this one are intended. If not, I could try to explain though: the usual handling is that the lyrics are cropped to 10% of the original length. For very short lyrics, the remaining rest would be ridicolously short (like one word or just a few letters), so the lyrics are removed completely. My guess is that "{{Instrumental}}" is simply treated as if this was a very short lyrics content and is therefore fully removed. So if this really is an unhandled special case, then that behaviour will be changed in future updates and the {{Instrumental}} template will be restored for old takedowns. Thanks for bringing this to my/our attention. I'll post the answer here. - Chris 18:12, September 12, 2011 (UTC)

I still got no answer but I did not forget about this. - Chris 16:30, October 9, 2011 (UTC)

Hiya,

I don't think we've ever discussed this explicitly with Gracenote, but {{Instrumental}} seems like meta-data and I don't think any song rights-owner could claim to have a copyright on the information of whether or not their song was instrumental? I'm not a lawyer, but for lack of better information, that's my best guess... that it should be okay to leave the {{Instrumental}} in there?

(Chris is right that it just happening now because the length of the template is so short that it's being treated as short lyrics).

-Sean Colombo 00:12, October 10, 2011 (UTC)

Unofficial YouTube videosEdit

Hello,

Though I'm no big part of the Lyric Wiki community at all, I do a lot of edits to the pages of bands I like, for instance I just recently brought Arcade Fire up to gold status, and I'm now working on Bon Iver. My question is this:

I've found a lot of unofficial YouTube videos embedded into lyric pages. Sure enough I like the idea of having a music sample of the lyrics you're reading, but in many cases these are bootleg recordings of live concerts, often with poor quality, or in general illegally uploaded videos from for example copyrighted material from MySpace Unplugged or similar. I am all for having official videos and officially released unplugged sessions or so on a page, but I've been removing videos with bad quality and that I know for a fact isn't uploaded by the copyright holders.

What's the policy on this?

Cheers -=KAG=-^{My Pride} 17:38, October 2, 2011 (UTC)

I don't think there's an official policy beyond the rule of thumb you seem to be using, that official videos are better than unofficial, and so on. I'd say it's fine to remove low-quality videos, especially live recordings with bad sound. As for copyright, that's really between YouTube and the copyright holders; the record companies seem to be pretty good about quickly having videos taken down if they are legitimate copyright violations, so we can probably assume that anything that's been up on YouTube for a while is okay.

Also note that you can add |audio as a parameter to the YouTube embedding template, and it will embed the video as an audio player only -- that's probably the best thing to do if a song's been uploaded to YouTube in the form of a homemade slideshow or something along those lines. (See the template page for more details.) Trainman 18:51, October 2, 2011 (UTC)

The xxEdit

Hello again

I'm trying to do some fixing on the lyrics for The xx, but there's a pretty big typo where the name here on lyric wiki is The Xx, with one capital X. Which is wrong. Wondering if someone could help me sort this out. Some redirect pages will need to be deleted, and I fear there'll be many double redirects if I just move the page on my own. Does anyone have a bot that can handle this rather tedious task for me?

-=KAG=-^{My Pride} 23:08, October 2, 2011 (UTC)

Please look at our page naming policy before you do any further moving. Thanks! — 6×9 (Talk) 06:03, October 3, 2011 (UTC)

How about that. All right, never mind me (: -=KAG=-^{My Pride} 09:04, October 3, 2011 (UTC)

ASIN for songs? Edit

I wonder whether ASIN for the songs themself make sense actually. I would guess only singles would have an ASIN - or is the ASIN for the mp3 downloads for the songs the one to look for and put it into the page? I'm a bit puzzled about what to do in those cases and what to put...

Thanks in advance for any insight in how you do that! Rhonda D'Vine 18:54, October 5, 2011 (UTC)

I've always filled in the MP3-ASIN, because from there you can get everywhere else really easily. - Chris 15:42, October 9, 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, makes sense of course. Will go through my certed songs and add them for completion. :) Rhonda D'Vine 09:32, October 18, 2011 (UTC)

Message Wall (wanna try it early?) Edit

The new message wall system is out on test wikis (it's a way to try to make talk pages easier to use). I'm digging it so far... if you guys check it out & we decide to give it a shot early, I can ask for them to turn it on for LyricWiki. See: Tough Pigs' wall on Muppet.
-Sean Colombo 18:59, October 5, 2011 (UTC)

I like the general idea, but as always I don't like the way how it's done. A lot of a lot of a lot too much space consuming design. Nope, I don't like that. - Chris 16:25, October 9, 2011 (UTC)

I don't like it either. Additional: I like on the Talk-Pages that you can show through the indentation to which message you are replying. On the "Message Wall" the replys are all on the same level. On discussions it's going to get really fast confusing, because all answers are mixed up and you cannot see to which reply a new one is referenced. — Salandas (Talk) 00:04, January 8, 2012 (UTC)

Song without Information blocking Gold status of Son Goku Edit

I am working to get Son Goku into gold status, and am almost complete with the task, there is only one song missing from their album Crashkurs. Though, there is this Other Song that I stumbled upon while looking for videos, An jedem Morgen.

YouTube: YouTube

What do you suggest to do? Given that the song hasn't been on any recording, and that the only reference is the video (I just found it on Thomas D's homepage too), I feel uncertain about ranking of the song (and thus of the whole artist).

Any opinion and welcome!! Rhonda D'Vine 09:40, October 18, 2011 (UTC)

Free Music of the WeekEdit

Free Music of the Week has been done and over with. No one will ever start up that one again. It needs to be either replaced or removed. I think that Artist of the Month would be a better idea. - hard4me 00:09, November 26, 2011 (UTC)

Featured PollEdit

I like the idea of a Featured Poll. However, the American Music Awards were a week or two ago and we already know that Taylor Swift won the Artist of the Year award. It needs to be updated. - hard4me 00:09, November 26, 2011 (UTC)

New main page look? Edit

Howdy. The content team has offered to help with our main page since it's been a while since we've given it a refresh. (Also we have some sections on the Main Page right now that we don't really update).

Anywho: I've bounced it back & forth with them a bit and here's what they've come up with so far: http://sixbitsnonethewiser.wikia.com/wiki/Super_Six_Bits_None_the_Wiser_Wiki

Notes:

• When it's done the links will go to LyricWiki pages, not to Billboard/iTunes pages.
• They think it'd be cool if we ported our menus to use the new Wikia nav (those blue menus)... I don't remember if that's going to be mandatory eventually or not.

Thoughts?
-Sean Colombo 18:00, December 9, 2011 (UTC)

Hm, I'm not really pro an update (I think I'm one of the few admins who really visits the mainpage quite often). Reasons why I'm against a change:

1. The current system is implemented in a way we can easily translate it. The "new" design does not look like that'd also apply for it.
2. Except for the Free Music of the Week, all sections are updated all the time. And for FMotW there was the idea of having it replaced with "Artist of the Month".
3. I love the current design for its straight and simple layout.
4. Opposed to that I don't like that design proposal. (Warning: You know that if it comes to design questions, I'm not the one to show mercy in my words.) I'll say straightforward that the dark box shadows make the boxes look clunky; as webdesigner, I have to say the trend goes towards white or light-gray pages with fine lines and large areas. Such a style makes a design look very classy.
5. The implementation of that page is... - sorry, but is that really done by a professional content team? If you've got CSS that applies to multiple elements, you add a class to the element and put the CSS into the common stylesheet. I hope the only reason they didn't do it is that implementing changes in the MediaWiki page is difficult because of the persistent caching of the stylesheets.
6. I like the idea of the twitter gadget, but we should swap the poll and the AotW.
7. I don't like that "Browse Lyrics" box. It's just the alphabet (with a wrapped zee oh em djee) and a switching title. Not worth being the top box if it's even worth being a box.
8. Sorry to say, but I noticed something: it's intresting how Wikia back then literally raped all the wiki navigations when they switched from Monaco to Oasis, limiting the nav-links to 4 times 7 no-submenu-items. All those beautifully arranged, complex navigations were forced into 28 items, with the argument "people don't like long navigations". Now they praise their new extended navigation with submenues... Um, yeah +1 for the new menu, though. Gives us a lot more possibilities!

All in all, if we decide to do a redesign of our mainpage, I'd like to submit my own design suggestion beforehand. - Chris 00:19, December 10, 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback! :) I'll respond by number:

1. Yeah, I definitely think we should keep our implementation translatable. The demo they put up doesn't use it, but I doubt anyone knows about our system except us. Whatever changes we do or don't end up making, I think it make sense to continue doing w/our translation system.
2. I nuked FMoTW at some point since I didn't think anyone would mind & I was sick of ppl giving me garbage about seeing JoJo every day ;)
3. The current one is definitely purty & the new one seems mainly based off of the old. It would be nice to do some refreshing though. :)
4. Clean is good. :) I do like separating sections w/borders though so that they don't bleed together. Maybe the drop-shadows are too much though. You guys are prob. better at that stuff than me so I don't have many more opinions to give on this point ;)
5. We can make the implementation good and right, so there's nothing to worry about there :) My guess is that you're probably right and he just inlined a bunch of stuff since he'd likely have to change it after our feedback & it's faster to just preview ONE page rather than having to change a MediaWiki:*.css page and wait for the caching to refresh.
6. Agreed on both points ^_^ twitter gadget works & poll looks good narrower while AotW looks good wider.
7. Glad you like the new nav :D

— The preceding unsigned comment was added by Sean Colombo (talk • contribs), 23:13, December 26, 2011 (UTC).

Okay, how about making my own proposal within the next days? - Chris 20:17, December 27, 2011 (UTC)

If you're up for it, that would be fantastic! :)

-Sean Colombo 20:24, December 27, 2011 (UTC)

Looks like you got busy (life happens! ^_^). I think they're gonna put up their version from the mockups and then we can dive in and start fixing it (the translation infrastructure, design fixes, everything we mentioned above & whatever else we think works :D ). BOHICA! ;)

-Sean Colombo 01:00, January 18, 2012 (UTC)

Following vs. Watchlist Edit

Hello everybody,

Newcomer question of the day: How come that on my user page I see a link to this apparently useless page and not to this very useful page? Is this on purpose?

--Rinaku 20:04, December 13, 2011 (UTC)

A very good question. That's what I've been asking all the time, too. But you can customize the toolbar at the bottom of all pages and add your watchlist to it. Hope that helps, Chris 20:11, December 13, 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. But as soon as I understood that Special:Watchlist existed, I could bookmark it. When I signed up 2 months ago, I thought that Following was LyricWiki's or Wikia's standard Watchlist, because I set the language of the interface to French, in which the 2 are translated by the same word Suivi. Only today, as I was starting to write my own watchlist on my user page, did I realize that the URL was not the same as on Wikipedia... --Rinaku 21:55, December 13, 2011 (UTC)

adding a band of the same name? Edit

so........ the band i wanna add some lyrics for are called The Kick ( these guys) but The Kick they have a page for is..... someone i don't know....

so............. how do we add a page for "MY" The Kick? — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Paradive (talk • contribs).

Looks like the The Kick that's here already is a band that's not on Discogs, but here they are on Musicbrainz.

For a band/artist with the same name as another band/artist, you can add an identifier in parentheses, usually the country of origin -- for example, The Kick (Sweden). Trainman 01:36, December 16, 2011 (UTC)

so where's the link to add a new band page? — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Paradive (talk • contribs).

Anytime you try to go to a nonexistent page, you'll be offered the chance to create that page -- so all you have to do is click on the red "The Click (Sweden)" link above. Trainman 03:39, December 17, 2011 (UTC)

done. everything looks alright (i think... here), but i think i may have misspelled/stylized "BritPop". does that look right?

and how do i add a pic? (nevermind. figured it out.) — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Paradive (talk • contribs).

Looks good -- and, in fact, since I last looked, one of the other admins, Senvaikis, decided "your" The Kick should be the main one, so it's now at The Kick and the other one was moved to The Kick (US).

Britpop, with no capital P, is the spelling that's used here. There's also a relatively new template to list band members, genres, and record labels, ArtistInfo, which I added. Trainman 00:43, December 20, 2011 (UTC)

Groovshark Edit

Grooveshark links (in Song, Album and Artist templates) would possibly be a good idea. They provide a free and legal way to listen to music and you don't even need to have an account.-Athaba 23:46, December 14, 2011 (UTC)

Great idea IMO. Should be added to our current templates, and Will definitely be implemented into my T-Line! - Chris 22:18, December 17, 2011 (UTC)

Same thing with Soundcloud. Some artists are there present. At least in the Artist-Template would it be interesting to link to the appropriate Soundcloud-Page. -- Salandas 01:42, January 5, 2012 (UTC)

You may want to look at two already existing templates:

• {{ListenMusic}}, linking to artist, album or song on listen.music.itop.net
• {{HelloDj}}, linking to artist, album or song on hello.dj

See also artist, album and song pages as the samples of these templates using.

hth, --Senvaikis ^(talk) 12:29, January 15, 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the hint to both templates. Based on them I created a SoundCloud-Template (User:Salandas/Templates/Soundcloud, example at Celldweller:Louder_Than_Words). If there are no objections, I'm going to copy this into the Template-Namespace. Additionally I would like to add soundcloud as a parameter into the various footers: If the admins agree I will create you the source you would have to add to them.

Soundcloud offers the possibility to embed songs onto external pages. Has the audio-embed to be go-ear? Else I would try to implement a template to embed the song on the song-pages.

I'm no Grooveshark-User, so if you post URL examples to artists/albums/songs, I will create a template for it. (Chris, are there any requirements to fit the T-Line?) — Salandas (Talk) 22:11, January 16, 2012 (UTC)

Ad legality: Grooveshark is not a good idea to link to: Because it does not have licenses to use the songs its legality is a big qustion mark (see [1]). Additionally several labels (Universal Music, Warner Music, etc...) are suing them because of this (in Germany Grooveshark is already blocked/disabled). We should better add competition which do have the license. — Salandas (Talk) 17:28, January 19, 2012 (UTC)

Problem with (invalid) Facebook link Edit

I worked over the whole Stahlmann-Page and found the incorrect entry "Stahlmann" under "facebook" in the {{ArtistHeader}}-Template, which leads to the link [2] which is not correct. So I entered the Value "pages/Stahlmann/138756019513864" which leads to the correct link [3]. But untfortunatley the page is now in the category Invalid_Facebook_Link. What has to be done to get this fixed? --Salandas 23:15, January 4, 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. I didn't knew that the numerical id only works on pages, too. -- Salandas 21:51, January 5, 2012 (UTC)

A few questions/comments Edit

If you can respond to any/all of these questions/comments, that would be helpful.

1. Is it necessary to know ALL of the lyrics absolutely before a page can be upgraded to gold? For example, I was working on certifying this song, which I typed up myself from the lyrics on the album insert, but after listening to it I noticed that the singer repeats the first couple lines, but the second time the ending is different and he kind of trails off and I don't really know what he said. Can this not be gold until I know? Which will probably never happen? It's the only song that's keeping the album from gold.

2. I think it would be cool if there were simple forward and backward arrow keys on song pages that led to the next and previous songs on an album. If a song is on more than one album, there could be more than one set of arrow keys. I think this often when I am listening through an album while reading the lyrics, and have to go back to the album page before going to the next song. This would also would be cool for albums that have videos on most of their song pages. Then you can go on kind of a musical journey more easily by just clicking through the album in order.

3. Is there a set way to enter credits? I saw the credits template on that page but it doesn't seem to be standard...

4. Is there any page where we can request feedback for the work that we are doing? When I do things on the pages I edit, I feel kind of isolated, and I wonder sometimes if I am making mistakes that I don't know about. Sometimes my work is corrected by someone, which is helpful, but it is usually a bot. Is the extent of feedback? If this is the place to request it, and you have time, the main area I have worked on is Danielson.

Thanks and good night. Andersol 09:45, January 9, 2012 (UTC)

I cannot answer to all questions, but the last ones I can say at least a bit:

ad 2. Don't know really, but I think, this might be correct somehow: At the moment it would be nearly impossible to implement such a function. Primarily, no song has any information what it's position on a disc it has, additionally most remix-pages link to the original songs lyrics. Ok, this could be easily added to {{Song}}. But I don't think that there is a efficient way to find the song of the same album which has in its header the same number in-/decreased by 1...

ad 3. An official guideline seems to be only this section: Help:Contents/Editing/Formatting/Songs#Credits. On this Discussion page is also a section where a template has been requested. Because I had the same problem as you I created {{CreditBox}}, but it is no official thing. If you surf around a bit, you will find many types of credits. At the moment only the content is relevant, maybe this will change someday in the future. ;-)

ad 4.: I don't know if there is a place for these requests. But I looked into the page a bit and noticed:

• For the Additional Infos about the artist I suggest looking into {{ArtistInfo}} (you will find an example at Stahlmann)
• Looking at Danielson:Danielson_Alive_(EP)_(2008), "(EP)" is not a part of the title and should only be noted as "type=EP" in the {{Album}}/{{Song}}-Template. (see also LW:PN#Album_Pages)
• Since you are interested in Gold-Rankings you should try to get rid of the "Other Songs"-Section. (see Help:Page_ranking/Artists#Other)

— Salandas (Talk) 00:05, January 10, 2012 (UTC)

Album ranking star on artist pageEdit

Not sure if this has been discussed already, but wouldn't it be nice to have the album ranking star be displayed on the artist page as well? Maybe above the cover or next to the album title.
This way one could see at once which album pages need work without having to click through all of them? Darknite47 15:55, March 21, 2012 (UTC)

Agree that it would be useful, but (unless we implement the transclusion of albums on artist pages) it would need to be synchronised manually (just like the tracklist)... — 6×9 (Talk) 20:42, March 21, 2012 (UTC)

iTunes links for people who don't use iTunes Edit

I was wondering if there's any way for people who don't use iTunes to get the full iTunes links for songs. I've got a couple albums to near-Gold status but I can't or don't know how to do the iTunes field. SHeavy:Synchronized (2002) needs iTunes links for every song but once that's done the album will be Silver, and Dog Fashion Disco:Adultery (2006) needs iTunes for Dog Fashion Disco:The Sacrifice Of Mrs. Rose Covington and Dog Fashion Disco:The Hitchhiker to be Gold. Jeff (talk|stalk) 00:11, April 11, 2012 (UTC)

The easiest way is a tool Apple provides to generate these links: iTunes Link Maker. You simply enter the Artist or album, etc. and the tool lists all possible targets (artists/albums/songs) presenting you the iTunes Link for each of them. You only have to copy them. — Salandas (Talk) 00:26, April 11, 2012 (UTC)

unknown artist in the way Edit

i'm looking to add a page for a band called Index (this guy: http://www.discogs.com/artist/Index ) but this already exists (http://lyrics.wikia.com/Index) with a whole 1 song posted.

so, uh, now what?

Do you think the song might be from this band, or is that one from a different band? If it is the same band then you are already where you want, you just have to fill in the other information you like? I've seen a song called "Black Razor" in one of the albums on discogs, so it might be that one, just wrongly titled? Rhonda D'Vine 10:10, April 19, 2012 (UTC)

nope. i'm 98% sure it's from another guy. according to discogs, there are 10 different Index'. so a conflict is rather expected i guess.

A search for the lyrics suggests that the song is by Infant Trauma – an artist that doesn't appear to exist outside of lyric pages… Anyway, it's out of the way now :-)

@Paradive: please sign your posts by adding ~~~~. Thanks! — 6×9 (Talk) 15:30, April 20, 2012 (UTC)

THANKEE!

~~~~ paradive (that all you mean?)

all done. my other question is how do i change the myspace link?

Two questionsEdit

First. What's the proper way to handle an album that had slightly different track listings based on region? Monster Magnet's God Says No album had different listings for the US, UK, and Japan, and I'm trying to get that album up to Gold.

Second. What do you do if you've got a song that for whatever reason isn't on any of the sites? Just mark everything as "not applicable"? I got hold of the Japan-only bonus track for God Says No and added the lyrics, but absolutely none of the external sites like Amazon have it. Jeff (talk|stalk) 02:20, April 29, 2012 (UTC)

1) Use the {{OL}} template like you did. I corrected the pipe position though (the API only recognizes lines starting with "#" as a track, therefore it's important that the pipe is behind the previous line, not in front of the current line).

2) You just mark them "not applicable", if that's what they are, yes. - Chris 19:51, April 29, 2012 (UTC)

Yt objectEdit

Hello,

Apparently it is impossible to put an <object> element on a page: it just appears as plain text. Anyone knows if there is a reason for that?

I think it would be interesting to be able to use this element, for video embedding. Currently there is the YouTube extension which enables <youtube></youtube> and {{#youtube:}} (and their equivalents for a few other sites), which in turn translate to <object>.

They work but as far as I understand you can't improve on them. For example, I would like to embed Dailymotion videos, or to add a t= (start time) parameter to a YouTube video. Do you know how we could do something like this?

--Rinaku 18:07, April 30, 2012 (UTC)

Hi Rinaku, yes all HTML tags are treated as plain text except for a few. Those object-tags are produced when the display code is generated, they are translated internally. You'd have to write an extension to add Dailymotion. Most HTML is turned off because enabling it would allow malitious code to be parsed. - Chris 19:24, April 30, 2012 (UTC)

Alright. I've found the code of the extension and I think it would be easy enough to add a website. Do you by chance know what I should do to submit a change to Wikia? And if I could try it on Wikia? (I would be happy not to start by setting up a MediaWiki at home...) --Rinaku

Found answers. I will work on the extension when I have time and try to get the changes integrated into Wikia with the help of User:Sean_Colombo. --Rinaku 21:39, May 8, 2012 (UTC)

Okay, but please make sure you don't jeopardize the extension-, site- and database safety. The code behind object tags can be mighty applications that are able to easily exploit security holes. - Chris 21:11, May 9, 2012 (UTC)

The idea is to copy the YouTube part of the extension and to modify it toward this. And maybe to improve the YouTube part too. If you see something dangerous I could trigger while only embedding objects from these trusted sites, please tell. Eventually, you will be able to see the code here. --Rinaku 21:42, May 9, 2012 (UTC)

Hope you've noticed already a broken look (and functionality) of embedded youtube player in audio-only mode. Isn't that a result of some changes in yt extension? --Senvaikis ^(talk) 20:46, May 11, 2012 (UTC)

I didn't do anything yet. The extension didn't change recently, nor did the template, so I guess this change comes from YouTube. --Rinaku 14:56, May 12, 2012 (UTC)

No, I didn't notice any changes on Yt side - my local test page, used for audio-mode implementation, still works fine, showing the same (bottom) part of yt object, with all player controls visible. So, I'm pretty sure: the reason - some changes in css. Hope Chris may know that better... --Senvaikis ^(talk) 13:28, May 13, 2012 (UTC)

Since a few weeks or months, the YT player changed its design. It hides the controls for small player sizes to enlarge the movie.

Test it: set the height back to the usual height of 209 (with Firebug) and click on the play button in the middle. The player recalculates the display mode on playback event, thus it notices that the player object is big enough to display a fixed controlbar again. Ergo the controls stay visible, during playback, even if you reduce the size back to 25. On the other way round, if you click onto the player (but not on the title as that'll open the YouTube page, click somewhere behind) and then use the spacebar to start the video, you'll see that the recalculation found the viewport to be too small for fixed controls, which is why it hides them after 2 seconds.

The "audio-only mode" is in fact a layout bug-using: the controls are at the bottom, therefore the code for them is internally the bottom-most within the player object. Like in HTML, the element defined later covers the elements before. Because of that, if the video (fixed to top border) and controlbar (fixed to bottom border) are pushed one upon the other, the controls stayed visible, hiding the video. Et voila, audio-only "mode".

The new algorithm makes the toolbar switch to hover-mode though. As a video-player isn't designed to be that small (nobody watches videos at 25 pixels), it looks buggy, but actually it's just the usual view: title-bar above movie with play button, and hidden controls until you start the video.

You didn't notice that "feature" because on YouTube your player is usually large enough. That is: either wait until they pin the controls again, or disable audio mode. I have no idea why this test page of yours still works though... Can I see it? - Chris 21:40, May 13, 2012 (UTC)

Yes, Chris, you are right, speaking about current yt player (version #3), and all the tests described above (with the same results) I've made before writing my last msg :).

But then I checked my old local testpage:

<html>
 <body>
   <object 
    type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
    data="http://www.youtube.com/v/g0SicAEukI8&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=g0SicAEukI8" 
    width="300" height="25" id="YT_g0SicAEukI8">
    <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/g0SicAEukI8&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=g0SicAEukI8"/>
    <param name="wmode" value="transparent"/>
    <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/>
   </object>
 </body>
</html>

As you can see, it contains a slightly different yt object, returned by #yt extension. And if you try it, - it'll still work in an 'old-style'... But if Rinaku is right and #yt code's still the same, then it should contain the same yt object innerHTML (see the code). But it doesn't, so - some changes on our side should be done anyway, imo. --Senvaikis ^(talk) 07:50, May 14, 2012 (UTC)

The code produced by the YT extension is:

<object width="252" height="25" id="YT_g0SicAEukI8" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/g0SicAEukI8&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=g0SicAEukI8" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"><param value="http://www.youtube.com/v/g0SicAEukI8&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=g0SicAEukI8" name="movie"><param value="transparent" name="wmode"><param value="always" name="allowScriptAccess"></object>

With linebreaks and some sorting you get this:

  <object 
    type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
    data="http://www.youtube.com/v/g0SicAEukI8&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=g0SicAEukI8" 
    width="300" height="25" id="YT_g0SicAEukI8">
    <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/g0SicAEukI8&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=g0SicAEukI8"/>
    <param name="wmode" value="transparent"/>
    <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/>
  </object>

<object
    type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
    data="http://www.youtube.com/v/g0SicAEukI8&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=g0SicAEukI8"
    width="252" height="25" id="YT_g0SicAEukI8">
    <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/g0SicAEukI8&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=g0SicAEukI8">
    <param name="wmode" value="transparent">
    <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always">
  </object>

As you can see, it's not different. Actually, if I copy the current (unsorten) code onto an empty HTML page like you did with your test app, it also works. But I can't image how our page configuration might influence the YouTube-Player? Any idea? - Chris 20:32, May 16, 2012 (UTC)

Actually, you can take the full source code of this page, save it to a HTML file, open it in your browser, and the YT box shows just the control bar like it's supposed to. I'm stumped. — 6×9 (Talk) 21:18, May 16, 2012 (UTC)

Don't you think, that extension, producing yt player for our pages, isn't one, which code we are looking at - just can't find any other explanation. No, that's impossible.

Then remains CSS (some player props may be affected through it). That's not truth also. --Senvaikis ^(talk) 21:37, May 16, 2012 (UTC)

Made an experiment, placing the same yt test-object on hosted web-site. Result: the same yt object behaves differently when used on a local page and viewed from web page, without using any additional CSS.

Seems yt/a should be anounced deprecated (and replaced by just yt)...--Senvaikis ^(talk) 05:39, May 17, 2012 (UTC)

Rather than marking it deprecated, why not add "?version=2" after the video id? Works at least on my local xampp installation. Funnily enough, "?version=3" breaks it for the local file as well… So it seems YT decides on which API version it chooses based on the client. — 6×9 (Talk) 06:33, May 17, 2012 (UTC)

Seems it's the referer (or lack thereof). (Shortened) GET request from localhost:

GET /v/g0SicAEukI8&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=g0SicAEukI8 HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Referer: http://localhost/index.html
User-Agent: wouldn't you like to know
Host: www.youtube.com
...

Response is shockwave/flash from www.youtube.com.

When opening as file protocol the request is identical, except that the referer is missing. Response is a 303 and redirection to youtube.googleapis.com. So I'd guess YT interprets missing referer as sign of a broken client and switches to older, possibly more compatible version. — 6×9 (Talk) 07:19, May 17, 2012 (UTC)

If #yt code may be changed, - why then change can't be done to a new-type embeding code? Just look here :) --Senvaikis ^(talk) 11:36, May 17, 2012 (UTC)

Damn, - on my laptop iframe looks the same as the object (contarry to my work-desktop, where iframe's controls were visible from the start, without auto=hiding = exactly as in an "old-style" player). Don't understand nothing...--Senvaikis ^(talk) 15:05, May 17, 2012 (UTC)