PickiPedia:Compositions
Compositions, whether lyrical or instrumental, get a page in the Song: namespace, and everything else points at it. Obviously these are traditionally separated into "Songs" and "Tunes", but doing so complicates the logic too much, for little gain.
Track listings from records, sessions, and setlists all name / link the composition (and use its metadata) rather than describing it again.
This page is the shape of that, written early and expected to change. Tens of thousands of these pages are coming, and the decisions that will hurt are the ones about identity — which pages are the same song — rather than about page count.
One page per composition
The page is the composition: the thing somebody wrote or the tradition carries. Not a recording of it, not a performance of it.
- Song:Drowsy Maggie is the tune.
- 4masks is a record, which has a track that is a recording of that tune.
- A show's setlist names the same tune, and so does a podcast episode that discusses it.
The recordings live on the song's page. A record page holds what is true of the record — its art, its licence, its running order — and asks the songs for the rest. Put another way: fix a lineup where the lineup is, and every page that mentions it follows.
Naming
The common name, plainly. Song:Blackberry Blossom, not Song:Blackberry Blossom (traditional). Whether a tune is traditional is a fact about it and belongs in its data, not in its title; a title is an address, and loading it with metadata makes every link uglier and every rename likelier.
Other names become redirects. A tune known four ways gets one page and three redirects, so that a link written by somebody who knows it by another name still lands. The page also records those names as data, which is what lets an importer resolve a setlist without a human in the loop.
When two unrelated compositions share a name, the plain title becomes a disambiguation page listing them. There genuinely are many songs called "Victory".
How the individual pages are then named is not settled. The preference is an index number where one exists — a Roud number for a traditional song, or whatever standard index covers the repertoire in question — because an index number is a claim somebody else already checked, and it does not go stale when our opinion of a song changes. Where no index covers it, we will need something else, and that something is worth arguing about when we hit it rather than deciding in the abstract now.
What a song page records
Prose about the song, and data anything else can query:
- who wrote it, where known, and whether it is traditional
- index numbers and external identifiers, which are how a reader gets from here to whoever knows more
- other names it goes by
- the recordings of it: which record, whose session, who played what
The last of those is written by the import pipeline from session data and sits in a marked block; the rest is written by people.
This wiki is the canonical source
Some of this data arrives from elsewhere, and a page may point outward to an index or an archive that knows more about a tune than we do. That is a reference, not a parent: no page here is a copy of a record kept somewhere else, and nothing here records which pipeline a fact arrived through. A fact on a song page is the wiki's, and correcting it here is correcting it.
See also
- Template:Song
- Template:In the studio — the other end of the same data, on a musician's page
- PickiPedia:Creative Commons
