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[Sean Colombo]

Sean Colombo 15,220 edits since April 6, 2006

15,220

User talk:Sean Colombo/Archive/2006 May 2 - 2006 September 13

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[edit] A request page

Isn't it would be great, if we can see which bands, artists, albums and songs are wanted by the community? And is there a way that we tell the place of lyrics and your ÜberBot gets them for us? This place is short in lyrics in some genres. --Stradicaster 03:36, 11 June 2006 (PDT)

Good idea! I just created LyricWiki:Requests so people can make their requests known. As far as telling ÜberBot about other sites, his talk page would be a good place to leave suggestions. He has a partially-completed script that can get a whole bunch more songs, the biggest concern is just to make sure that he doesn't end up making duplicates, but I guess people can check that after-the-fact to make sure he didn't mess up.
Thanks for your input!
-Sean Colombo 09:22, 11 June 2006 (PDT)


[edit] ÜberBot again

hi sean,

i've noticed that the ÜberBot has screwed up foreign letters. how does he get the songs and where from? maybe i can help with a little php code? if not - at least i can do is convert all german letters to correct ones :) i already corrected "Wenn Engel hassen" because all special chars where displayed false in the little proggi stradicaster wrote.

Hiya. The problem was caused by mySQL... they really messed up the conversion of unicode between v4.0 and v4.1, but it shouldn't happen again for new data. ÜberBot gets his info from a variety of sites, but he just did one main scrape then stopped so that he wouldn't be making revisions faster than we could keep up with (I was considering doing another insertion, not sure if that would be safe yet). Thanks for the offer to convert some of the characters... is there still enough info in the characters to tell what they were supposed to be? If there is, someone could write a bot to go through and fix a bunch of the pages... w00t!
-Sean Colombo 06:58, 19 June 2006 (PDT)
hehe - i had the same problem converting from forms into mysql-database. so if the bot works correct now i browse through the archive. i've seen there are a lot of songs that are not put into albums.

[edit] Umlaute Charset

I just noticed that Umlauts (special characters) do not work properly. So for example on Jbo there are much links with Umlauts in it, which will not work althoug the site exists. Example: Jbo:Könige. Also in the lyrics Umlauts do not work. Only a ? is displayed. 87.234.229.209 14:40, 25 June 2006 (PDT)

Yeah, that was a problem with the database version (mySQL 4.1) (see the UberBot_again section above). If you use them now it should work... it's just that there are a bunch of umlauts from the original scrape that are botched so we have to change them manually (I don't think there is a way to tell between ¶ and ¼ automatically w/o actually knowing the foreign languages. If I'm wrong on that feel free to correct me, then I could write a bot to fix them all.
Thanks for t3h info,
-Sean Colombo 18:14, 25 June 2006 (PDT)

I renamed some of the german songs from Subway to Sally and it workred quite good. Just one song failed the link after the rename. Eagle
On the artist page B¶hse Onkelz not a single link works. Even if you replace ? with ¶ the linked lyrics dont seem to exist. Has the bot made a mistake and eaten these? Anyway, could ÜberBot add these songs http://www.onkelz.de/ContentDisplay.do?action=tracksByName please. Alex42 05:51, 26 June 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Not Found!?

Hi Sean,

I created a new artist page, but after finishing the site... it's not available. The only possibility is to edit this artist or to show the versions of articles:
http://lyricwiki.org/Mind.in.a.box
http://lyricwiki.org/index.php?title=Mind.in.a.box&action=edit

I hope I made no errors!? First I thought the dots are a problem but on Wikipedia "mind.in.a.box" is also available, look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind.in.a.box

What should I do? :(

See Turok's talk page -Sean Colombo

[edit] Time to wait

Hi Sean,

thanks for your fast response. But when do you think the problem is resolved? It's a pity that nobody can reach (bad english!?) the pages directly. Now I have to wait very impatiently. ;) --Turok 11:57, 1 July 2006 (PDT)

 :-/ I'll work on it right now... I'll let you know if I can't figure it out.
-Sean Colombo 20:58, 1 July 2006 (PDT)
W00t! It appears to be fixed! Both the ampersand problem (as seen on Belle And Sebastian) and the period problem that you brought up for Mind.in.a.box. The .htaccess file I wrote is kinda... hackish, so if anyone sees anything wrong or missing on the site, let me know!
-Sean Colombo 22:31, 1 July 2006 (PDT)

[edit] GREAT work

Yes Sean, that's it! I've tested the pages completely... there is no error anymore, very great :)
But only another little question: is it right that the <lyrics> tags will replace the spaces at the beginning? Then I have to retype a lot of songs now. ;) This should be highlighted. --Turok 03:41, 2 July 2006 (PDT)

Thanks :) Yup, the <lyrics> tags will replace the spaces, but I think it's safe to do this casually for a while. If we use it for a week or two more and don't see any problems with it, that's something ÜberBot could fix automatically on the remainder of the pages.
-Sean Colombo 06:08, 2 July 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Comment

This was moved here from another page I write lyrics to classical compositions. In 1980 Cleo Laine recorded a lyric I wrote to Erik Satie's Gymnopedie No1. Mine was the first track on the album, "Sometimes When We Touch" and became the A side of a single. Between the two formats worldwide sales reached over one million and the album was No2 in the British classical charts for twelve weeks.

More recently I have collaborated with a choral arranger to write sixteen songs in a project we call "Lyrics For Classics". Bach, Debusy, Ravel, are all there with lyrics overlayed. I even threw in a piece by Miles Davis ("Jean Pierre").

In order to promote the collection of songs I wrote a parody on "Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy", had a demo recorded by a bass/baritone and created a character that would be the persona of whoever might ultimately record the commercial version. Meet the Russian ballet dancer, Rudemiller Fallenover (Rude to her friends).

In three months the song, "Hairy Fairy" notched up 5000 downloads- peanuts for a pop song but not bad for a classicsl parody.

There is also a parody on Saint-Saens' "Danse Macabre" (my title- Danse Gastronomique") You can download that one too. There are soundclips of ten other songs in this collection.Visit website: www.lyricsforclassics.com

Go to Google and type in Rudemiller Fallenover and see what happens. I would not mind publishing the lyric on your site.

Sounds good. Please see our Help page if you need to know more about adding them. If you would like to put a link to your site (so you can sell those glossy's), please do so in the External Links section.
Thanks for your interest!
-Sean Colombo 15:36, 29 June 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Adminship

Well thank you for making me an admin, and I look forward to working on Lyricwiki. - Bagel7 09:15, 10 July 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Statistics

Do you keep any statistics for this site? It would be interesting to see how the site has developed in terms of users pages and edits. I don't know what wikimedia uses for their stats (which now seem to be unavailable). I have put together some simple scripts to maintain statistics on this site. See Detailed LyricWiki Stats and info. It has only been running for about 20 hours, over time it will collect more data.

I would like to write a similar script to more reliably generate data directly from the database (allowing historic data right back to time 0), but this could be a while away.

If you like it, you might like to add a link in MediaWiki:Sitestatstext in a few weeks once more data is collected.

If you know of any other stats generation mechanisms, let me know.

-TrevorP 05:02, 11 July 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Spam

Open proxy IPs posting Viagra links and random number sequences are getting on my nerves. Maybe you should consider some Anti-spam Features? Or require people to register? --Frontway 06:44, 11 July 2006 (PDT)

Thanks. I implemented the regex spam filter. I used the default regex from the page then I added an option that I think should thwart the annoying random numbers. If you see any that are still getting by (after the timestamp on this message), please let me know where the edit was so I can look at the history and figure out a better way to counter the spammers.
Thanks again for the heads-up and the link (it was g00d)!
-Sean Colombo 12:00, 11 July 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Is This A Real Song?

That's my primary concern. Another concern I have is if it is appropriate for Lyricwiki, because it talks quite explicitly about sex. Cheers. - Bagel7 07:50, 12 July 2006 (PDT)

It is a real song, but after some googling I can't verify the lyrics, but I cant find any alternatives. Perhaps the lyrics should be marked as unconfirmed, low quality, or suspicious.
As for the explicit language, see User:Frontway and User:TrevorP/Commentary#Profanities. We need a template to warn about this. Feel free to write one. I'll step it up on my list of priorities, will try to get it done in the next 48 hours if you don't beat me to it.
-TrevorP 08:20, 12 July 2006 (PDT)
Wikipedia: 2 Live Crew - That particular song isn't 2 Live Crew, it's one of the members; Luke. I Wanna Rock is the first track on this album. And I'll try to fix the template. Sk¥l. --Frontway 08:24, 12 July 2006 (PDT)
Wowza. I remember hearing about 2 Live Crew (and apparently just its members) when I was younger. I think they got banned from doing shows in some states or something.
Thanks for jumping on that and figuring out what the deal was.
-Sean Colombo 10:14, 12 July 2006 (PDT)
PS: I don't think any song should be sensored, we should just make a way to let people choose if they want to be spared from intense lyrics. I agree with Trevor that a good way to start would be with a templatye for it. Either "NSFW" (not-safe-for-work) or "PA" (parental-advisory) should be fairly recognizable. Down the road we might even be able to make an extension that will present users with a prompt the first time they see a parental-advisory page, and let them opt out of seeing those pages in the future (and they would just get a canned-message instead).

[edit] Multiple questions

  • Is there a policy how to handle names of artists which changed over time? Beginner for example was renamed to "Absolute Beginner" and subsequently to "Beginner".
    • A:
  • I don't quite get the underscore business. Pink_Floyd for example contains links of the form # '''[[Artist_Name:Song_One|Song One]]''' and of the form # '''[[Artist_Name:Song One|Song One]]''' (their newest album). Which one is the preferred formatting option? Is there a difference when I create a page named "Artist_Name" and "Artist Name"?
    • A: There is no difference between the two ways of writing it, and there is no convention for the area left of the "|". It is generally preferred to uses spaces to the right of the "|" or if you are not using a "|".
  • Could someone be so kind and explain to me how artists' names containing "The" should be handled? I'd like to know how to name an artist's page, how to format links to the artist, which categories to use and where the artist's name will appear in categories, etc.
  • What exactly do I have to do besides adding a page to Category:The? (i.e. whom do I have to notify and how?)
    • A: If the artist does not have the correct title, just let me know & I'll run the bot that fixes the problem. If it's already the correct title, you don't need to do anything extra (we tend to leave them in that category anyway just for reference).
  • What should I do about non-english band names that possess a definite article? e.g. Fantastischen_Vier,_Die
    • A: Ouch, hadn't thought about that. To be consistent, we should use the same format as in english, so please put the definite article at the front of the artist name so that it would become Die Fantastischen Vier when creating new artists. If you find a page (like your example) that is already in the wrong notation, please add it to a similarly named category (in this case Category:Die) and then add that category as a sub-category of Category:The (I did this for "Die" to start it off) so that I can find all of the pages easily.
  • Where should I place my "move artist's page" requests?
  • Is it possible to include a page or a page section in another article? e.g. (a section of) an album page in an artist's main page? Duplicating that information seems to me to be a waste of space and time.
    • A:

That's it for the moment, feel free to move this section to a more appropriate place... vb 16:30, 12 July 2006 (PDT)

NOTE: I started putting the answers in here, I'll come back to the rest and do it later .

  • Is there a policy how to handle names of artists which changed over time? Beginner for example was renamed to "Absolute Beginner" and subsequently to "Beginner".
I imagine they would have three artist pages. Each with the releases made under their respective names. There should be a link between each to the former and newer name, explaining that their name changed. Perhaps another two templates are needed (new name and previous name).
  • I don't quite get the underscore business. Pink_Floyd for example contains links of the form # '''[[Artist_Name:Song_One|Song One]]''' and of the form # '''[[Artist_Name:Song One|Song One]]''' (their newest album). Which one is the preferred formatting option? Is there a difference when I create a page named "Artist_Name" and "Artist Name"?
The underscore is a result of the Mediawiki software. Because spaces can not be used in Internet addresses Mediawiki uses an underscore. When mediawiki sees a page name (in any situation, creating a page, or linking to a page) it will convert spaces to underscores. Therefore when creating a page, there is no difference between "Artist_Name" and "Artist Name". As for linking, as Sean said, the link is in the form [[Page Name|Friendly display]]. Underscores should generally not be used in the friendly display. And again, its your preference in the Page Name. The difference is so small I don't see that there needs to be an enforced standard.
  • Is it possible to include a page or a page section in another article? e.g. (a section of) an album page in an artist's main page? Duplicating that information seems to me to be a waste of space and time.
This issue has annoyed me also. You can include the album page within the artist page. To do this, use the format {{:PageName}}, eg, {{:VAST:Turquoise}} (see Pain_Of_Salvation). If their is a section of the album page that should not be included, surround it with <noinclude></noinclude>.
There is another possibility (not well thought out, so please comment), to place the content in the artist page, and create album pages that redirect to the correct section of the artist page.
-TrevorP 18:39, 12 July 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Capitalization

I'm a pedant when it comes to song titles so things like the small f in friends here (The Killers:Jenny Was A friend Of Mine) really annoy me (stupid, I know, but I can't help it). Is there an easy way to change this to a capital F? Should I make a redirect? Thanks, 81.86.155.153 07:00, 15 July 2006 (PDT)

You are right, every word should be capitalized. You can use the move tab on top of the page. That way you can rename the page and it gets automatically redirected. Renaming (moving) a page in Wikimedia --Moloz 07:58, 15 July 2006 (PDT)
Thanks :) 81.86.155.153 08:28, 17 July 2006 (PDT)

[edit] A few issues.

This is meant to be constructive criticism, sorry if it sounds rude. Here are a few things I've noticed from a newcomers perspective:

  1. The Lyricwiki:Community Portal seems to be a collection of style guidelines and template stuff. Why not move it to the help pages? You could have a Help:Style Guide page (details like every word must be capitalised in song titles, naming policies etc.) and a Help:Templates page with details of the main templates and where to use them. Also a Help:Categories page to outline all the different categories.
  2. Another useful help page would be an annotated example article like this one from wikipedia.
  3. On LyricWiki:Formatting Artists it says to use 
[link to wikipedia article about artist Artist Name] on Wikipedia

but on the community portal it says to use 

{{Wikipedia|Article=Article_name|Title=Artist Name}}

Which is preferable? Can we make it consistent?

  1. Can we tailor the text underneath each editing window more towards lyricwiki? It says "DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!" but all other lyric sites take pains to say that the lyrics are copyrighted. E.g. AZlyrics copyright statement:
United States Copyright Law provides the copyright owner and/or their representative with the exclusive right to create, reproduce and distribute derivative works based on copyrighted material. Unless you have received permission from the copyright owner or their representative to distribute the lyrics from their songs, you are in violation of the law.
  1. Also on the editing page, write something in the Project:Copyrights page so there isn't a red link every time you edit - looks unprofessional.
  2. Link to LyricWiki:Formatting Songs from the home page in a glaringly obvious way so less people contribute badly formatted lyrics. (My first edit [1] wouldn't have been so terrible if I'd seen that page)
  3. On the template for LyricWiki:Formatting Songs it says you should link to an amazon search of the artist and the album which the song is from. However on some of the song pages I have seen external links to the amazon searches of the artist and the song itself. Which is correct?
  4. Wouldn't it be more suitable to have articles like LyricWiki:Your first article in the Help namespace? Also, Help:Contributing isn't in either namespace.

Thats all. Thanks for reading this, it is meant to be constructive and I hope you didn't take offence. :) Amelia 09:41, 17 July 2006 (PDT)


Amelia, thank you for posting your comments. I don't have anything against any of those suggestions. Regarding some of your questions
  • I have fixed up the wikipedia temple (I think), check the LyricWiki:Community_Portal. Let me know if there's something wrong/missing.
  • I think there are some outstanding issues regarding copyright. They really need to be sorted out.
  • Regarding the amazon links, I don't know. Perhaps that's a question for Sean. I know those links provide some funding for this site, so I suppose the more the better? As I mentioned previously I think perhaps these links should be added my the mediawiki engine, rather than having to manually add them to pages.
    • I think the album is probably best, but if the song is a single and you have a link to the single, that works really well also. I think the asin template is more helpful than the search template, but it involves manually looking up ASINs for now. -Sean Colombo 10:23, 18 July 2006 (PDT)
  • Regarding confusion with help pages and namespaces, I find it confusing to find relevant talk discussions, these too seem somewhat scattered and unordered.
So, hey, go ahead and make some changes, fix up the problems you see. Be Bold as the wikipedians say. Even if pages are little more than stubs, wikis work on incremental improvements. These things need to be done, even if its one small step at a time. Feel free to add some items to my TODO page, I will help when I have time.
Keep thinking and commenting on what you see. Welcome to the community, and thankyou. - TrevorP 21:52, 17 July 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Upgrading of MediaWiki software

Upgrading to 1.7.x for use of new "magic words" and various bug fixes, significant to LyricWiki?

No need to do it yourself

  cheers!, --Frontway 04:46, 11 August 2006 (PDT)

I guess it's significant because DreamHost decided to upgrade me without me asking for it! lol... they said something about how it would help the load on the server. Since I didn't know about it until afterwards, that's why the plugins bar and the AdSense disappeared and a few other things are acting weird (some pictures like the bookmarking links on the main page aren't showing up). I'm working on fixing the changes now, but just so you know... we're upgraded!
-Sean Colombo 16:45, 24 August 2006 (PDT)
A relief for sure, but as with anything in life, problems walk the path of upgrades; ParserFunctions now use double ## in front of functions. I would assume it's due to the previous changes in ParserFunctions.php - just change it back to normal and it's all good: 
$wgParser->setFunctionHook( 'expr', array( &$wgExtParserFunctions, 'expr' ) );
$wgParser->setFunctionHook( 'if', array( &$wgExtParserFunctions, 'ifHook' ) );
$wgParser->setFunctionHook( 'ifeq', array( &$wgExtParserFunctions, 'ifeq' ) );
$wgParser->setFunctionHook( 'ifexpr', array( &$wgExtParserFunctions, 'ifexpr' ) );
$wgParser->setFunctionHook( 'switch', array( &$wgExtParserFunctions, 'switchHook' ) );
$wgParser->setFunctionHook( 'ifexist', array( &$wgExtParserFunctions, 'ifexist' ) );
   MediaWiki<3, --Frontway 03:01, 26 August 2006 (PDT)
I changed ParserFunctions back to not having the #'s anymore. Let me know if there are still any problems. -Sean Colombo 00:05, 27 August 2006 (PDT)
I don't know if you guys are already aware of this, but there are also some issues now if a page has multiple lyric tags (see M83:Car Chase Terror for example). Just thought I'd let you know...
-Moloz 05:40, 26 August 2006 (PDT)
I wasn't aware... thank you :). I can't really think of anything that would cause that, so I asked TrevorP for help (he wrote the extension), hopefully one of us will figure it out soon.
-Sean Colombo 00:05, 27 August 2006 (PDT)

[edit] SOTD August 24, 2006

Hi Sean Colombo! I'm just here to tell you that your nomination of Weird Al Yankovic:Don't Download This Song has won Song of the Day for August 24, 2006!
Thanks for nominating a song and for contributing to LyricWiki!
-ÜberBot 00:01, 24 August 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Category:Requests For Deletion

Hi there are quite a number of Requests For Deletion outstanding. Rgwt 03:42, 25 August 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Need A Little Help

Hi Im new to the site but I pretty much know how to do most of the basic stuff having some expreience in other wikis. Just need some help here http://www.lyricwiki.org/Ed_Harcourt going there you will see that Those Crimson Tears doesnt have lyrics. Look a little more down and you will see Crimson Tears does have lyrics. Crimson Tears should be renamed to Those Crimson Tears. I dont know how to rename a page so if you can do it or whatever it would help. Thanks

Hi, welcome to the site! I see you figured it out... congrats and thanks for your contributions! If you have any questions in the future, don't hesitate to ask.
-Sean Colombo 23:39, 26 August 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Hello from another Wiki site

Hi, Sean. My name's Evan Prodromou, and I'm one of the founders of Wikitravel [2]. The LyricWiki name has been popping up on my radar a lot lately (I saw the t-shirts at Wikimania, and it's appeared on a couple of Wiki lists I was looking at today) and I just wanted to say hi. Let me know how things are going, and if you have any questions about the MW software or whatever, let me know [3]. I'm in Montreal, not too far from Rochester -- we've got a few wiki events coming up next year up here, so chances are our paths will cross again.

Anyways, good work and good luck. --Evan 09:49, 7 September 2006 (PDT)

[edit] The Charset again

The Charset seems to be broken again, on the LyricWiki:Song_of_the_Day page Überbot screw up all umlauts and with every change added another char by each umlaut. Now the site shows up really ugly. Before someone corrects this Überbot should be fixed. Alex42 10:25, 9 September 2006 (PDT)

Hmm, I can't seem to find the instance of this anymore (except for what was still left over in the archive page). When is the last time you saw it happen? I think I fixed this problem this morning around 3am EST... now I've gone through and fixed the leftover errors in the archive... if you see it happen again (indicating that I didn't fix it this morning) please let me know. Thanks :)
-Sean Colombo 12:31, 9 September 2006 (PDT)
Ok, seems to be fixed Alex42 13:17, 9 September 2006 (PDT)
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