Template:Listening list entry

Listening list entry

One recommendation on a listening list. Each entry renders a row, and records the recommendation as a Semantic MediaWiki subobject. The second half is the point: a recommendation nobody can query is just a sentence.

The subobject lives on the list page rather than on the record's page, because the curator's note belongs to the curator. Put "start with this one" on the record and it becomes an opinion with no owner.

Record, not release

This template points at records — the encyclopedic article about a piece of music somebody put out. It never points at a page in the Release: namespace, which is something else entirely: one specific set of bytes that delivery-kid pins and seeds, keyed by IPFS CID. A single record spawns dozens of Releases, one per track per encoding. Almost nothing a curator recommends will have any Release at all.

Where a record is distributed first-party, its article carries Distributed as pointing at the Release. Listening lists stay uniform either way.

"Record" rather than "album" because a record can be a single, an EP, an album, a double or a soundtrack, and an album is only one of those.

Art

Each row shows the record's Album art, pulled live from the record's page with #show. The list carries no art of its own: create the record page with {{Record}} and an art= parameter, and every list recommending it upgrades itself. A record with no page — or no art — renders a dashed placeholder, which is an invitation, not an error.

Usage

Always use named parameters. A curator's note is prose, and prose contains =.

{{Listening list entry|artist=Alison Brown|record=Fair Weather (Alison Brown album)|display=Fair Weather}}

{{Listening list entry|artist=Michael Cleveland|record=Flamekeeper (Michael Cleveland album)|display=Flamekeeper
 |note=the one that named the band}}

{{Listening list entry|artist=Nashville Bluegrass Band|scope=artist
 |note=ALL ALBUMS, but maybe start here
 |entry_points=Unleashed (Nashville Bluegrass Band album); American Beauty (Nashville Bluegrass Band album)}}

See Template:Listening list/testcases for how each shape renders, including the degenerate ones.

Parameters

• artist – the credited artist. Linked; a redlink here is a page waiting to be written, which is most of what a listening list is for.
• record – the record. Omit it when the recommendation is of a whole catalogue.
• display – label for the record link, so the reader sees Fair Weather while the link points at Fair Weather (Alison Brown album).
• scope – record (the default) or artist.
• note – the curator's own words about this entry. Their voice, not ours; don't tidy it. The quotation marks are supplied by the stylesheet, so don't type them.
• entry_points – semicolon-separated records to start with. Only meaningful on an artist-scope entry. A trailing parenthetical disambiguator is stripped from the chip label automatically, so pass full page titles.
• n – position in the list as given. Recorded, not displayed; see below.
• listen – a URL where the record can be heard. An override: the record page's own Listen URL is the source of truth, and the row falls back to it.
• via – who's hosting that URL. Defaults to "listen".

On not numbering the rows

Rows appear in the order the curator gave them, and are not numbered, because a numeral reads as a ranking and almost nobody hands you a ranked list. The order is still recorded as List position, so a query can restore it and a future template can display it if some curator really does count down from twenty-five.

Styling

All of it lives in MediaWiki:Common.css, under the Listening lists headings, on the pp-ll- classes. Nothing here carries an inline style=. The whole body is written on one line: a line break between two block elements in a template makes MediaWiki emit an empty paragraph.

Semantics

Each entry records a subobject carrying Recommended record, Recommended artist, Curator note, List position and Appears on list.

That last one is deliberately redundant — SMW can find a subobject's parent page on its own, but printing it is awkward, and carrying it explicitly means a record's page can ask the useful question directly:

{{#ask: [[Recommended record::{{FULLPAGENAME}}]]
 |?Appears on list = Recommended on
 |?Curator note    = What they said
 |mainlabel = -
}}

To ask it about a person rather than a page — everything one curator recommends, anywhere — use a subquery:

{{#ask: [[Appears on list::<q>[[Curated by::Cory Walker]]</q>]]
 |?Recommended record
}}

See also

• Template:Listening list – the header that opens a list
• Template:Listening list/testcases – rendering tests
• Template:Record – the record infobox whose art these rows borrow
• Template:Src – for citing where a list came from
• Template:Firehose – the same idea applied to podcast episodes