Talk:Main Page/Archive/2006 May 2 - 2006 October 14

Thanks for your translation. However, that specific link is unlikely to be added to the front page. This is because the main page is currently undergoing a massive revision over at Main_Page/Layout/Proposals/Frontway and should be replacing the current main page rather soon. The next change to that page will likely be replacing it entirely. Also it looks like Frontway already moved your translation over to the new page, so nothing is being wasted.

You are more that welcome to help with translations of the rest of the new Main Page, just contact Frontway about it so that you don't trample on each other's work.

- Teknomunk 11:21, 11 September 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Outages

Hi, many of you have probably noticed that the site has been down for around 3 days two different times in the last month. I guess that's not terrible, but it's much lower than I'd like. I currently use DreamHost as a server, and they are great and let us do pretty much anything to the server that we want to. Apparently they have a hard time sometimes with sites with as much traffic as this one. We have been moved from server-to-server twice because our site has been increasing in traffic, so they wanted to balance their load. Both of these moves caused the problems that were responsible for the outages. I would suspect that these moves shouldn't keep happening (I figure that this time they probably put us on a practically empty server that hosts people's personal blogs or something). I'm not planning to switch webhosts, and since this site drains more money than it gives back, it's fairly unlikely that would be much of an option (DreamHost is very inexpensive, I've seen cheaper, but they wouldn't let me do cronjobs and other things that the wiki requires).

Just thought you might be curious (and possibly ticked off) after the outages, and I wanted to keep everyone in the loop.
-Sean Colombo 15:34, 8 July 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Covers

I was watching around the wiki and thought that would be cool if the song pages had some information about the artists who covered that song, and if it had some changes on the cover's lyrics and things like that (sorry if my english is not as good as it should be, but I'm spanish). Esteboix

Its on the todo list to link all the covers back to the original song. Theres a page of LyricWiki Possible Song Covers, but its massively long and Sean's going to run some text analsys on the list eventually to weed out some of them. Casualsax 12:22, 17 August 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Mass Moving?

I'd like to move a crapload of pages currently prefixed Tragically_Hip to The_Tragically_Hip, which (call me anal) is the correct name of the band. I've moved the artist page so http://www.lyricwiki.org/Tragically_Hip is now a redirect, but I thought I'd ask what to do with the rest of the album/song pages. Creating a bunch of redirects seems messy. For now I'll leave them as is, but it might be a good idea to figure out some general rules on what to do with bands starting with "The" now while it's still early. --dirtyepic 23:21, 4 June 2006 (PDT)

A list of artists that should begin with "The", but currently do not. This problem adheres from the use of the bot and the way it indexed artists. Unfortunately there's at this moment no easy way around this difficulty. --Frontway 23:49, 4 June 2006 (PDT)

Yeah, it's probably time that I got on that. It's 4am in my zone, so I'll do it later

-Sean Colombo 01:21, 5 June 2006 (PDT)

UPDATE I got a script working so that ÜberBot can rename a whole artist (moves all of their song/album pages and fixes all of the links). I used it to move Verve Pipe to The Verve Pipe. The next step is of course to have him use Category:The to fix all of those pages. Then I have to figure out how to allow people (maybe admins only?) to rename a whole artist. The reasoning for protecting it is that if a n00b or vandal messed it up, it would be a fairly messy fix (actually it would just be a counter-rename, but would have to be called more manually than just clicking 'rollback'). Anyone have thoughts on whether it should be protected? (or how I can use the wiki to trigger a bot?)?

-Sean Colombo 00:18, 6 June 2006 (PDT)

Hi everybody! On the subject of renaming "The" artists... I'm guessing this also happens to artists in other languages. Specifically, I've noticed artists in spanish (example: Tigres del Norte, Los). So, maybe there should be "La", "El", "Los" and "Las" categories? --Jorgenmz 17:54, 15 July 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Vocal Samples

I may be getting ahead of myself here, but I always thought it'd be cool to have a website with "lyrics" for the samples used in purely electronic music (like Biosphere's Patashnik or the Orb's Fluffy White Clouds). Should these be added, or is this, as I'd suggested, getting a little ahead of ourselves ? Perhaps we could even have the sample sources listed (for example, the vocal samples used in Velvet Acid Christ's Dial8 would list the Legacy of Kain videogames as their sample source).
-FloodSpectre 15:15, 19 April 2006 (PDT)

Those seem to me to be legit lyrics (which would just be entered on their own page like any other song). I've found myself wanting to look up what a techno/electronic song's samples were saying on more than one occasion. For sources (if known), probably just a Sources section below the lyrics would work quite well. Rock on.
-Sean Colombo 16:00, 19 April 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Translations

It would be great to post translations of songs in foriegn languages (Du Hast brought this up). How should it be formatted? And should we add language catagories? Casualsax 20:44, 18 April 2006 (PDT)

I propose this: in parentheses after the name of the song you put the standard 'language code' if there are multiple languages for that song. For example there would be Rammstein:Du Hast (ENG) and Rammstein:Du Hast (GER). There are ISO standard country codes for most countries, but countries and languages are not one in the same. Some countries having multiple languages and many languages (such as English) are used in many countries. Language Codes are probably much better. As far as categorization, I think we can assume all songs are in English unless otherwise categorized (since all of the main pages on this site are English, I think that's not unfair). So categorizing the german version as Category:Language GER would work (and then making 'Language GER' a subcategory of 'Language'). Lastly, the links between diff languages could just be added to the tops of the pages below where it has the links to the artist and album. Does anyone see any problems with these ideas or have any different suggestions?
-Sean Colombo 00:21, 19 April 2006 (PDT)

That seems to be a standard wiki approach. The main thing I see with it is that by having different pages with different translations, you lose the ability to differentiate between which language is the original. Is it unfair to other languages (ie, French) to have the English translation of say, Du Hast, on the main page? Casualsax 07:11, 19 April 2006 (PDT)

Ohhh, now I see the problem. I was thinking about songs which were actually released in other languages (eg: Nena:99 Red Balloons)... your translation of Du Hast was just to be helpful, but (I think) the song wasn't actually released in English. If the song wasn't actually released in another language, we should probably keep it on the same page and just give it a seperate section like you did with Du Hast. To allow for multiple translations we should probably name the sections like "Translation (ENG)", etc. and the Wiki can eventually make a table-of-contents if there are a bunch of translations.
-Sean Colombo 10:33, 19 April 2006 (PDT)

My boss has a copy of Sehnsucht with the English version of both Engel and Du Hast on it, so no problem there.
-FloodSpectre 14:59, 19 April 2006 (PDT)

I have added a RequestTranslation template to be placed on a page containing non-english lyrics, to signify a request to have the page translated to english. The template accepts one parameter, the language (ISO codes i assume) of the original. I think its safe to make the "to english" assumption, as this is an english wiki. Just trying to follow the previous conversation:

• if a song is released in another language, it the page should be named with the language in the title.
• if its released in multiple languages, there should be multiple languages.
• If its only released in one language (non-english), how should the song be titled?
• A translation to english should be placed in the original page? (ie, no extra page added just for the translation). This makes sense, the original title (and language) should be preserved, the translations are essentially only "notes" about the song.

-TrevorP 16:59, 21 May 2006 (PDT)

Hmmm, we have a new artist 崔健, does anyone know what language this is (chinese)? or the english name of the artist? -TrevorP 16:50, 23 May 2006 (PDT)

Ciu Jian (崔健) Last.fm Wiki. --Frontway 11:34, 5 June 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Genre

Would it be a good idea to add the category of "genre" to artist pages ? I've done this for Proem, but obviously no genre pages exist for it to link to just yet.
-FloodSpectre 17:58, 17 April 2006 (PDT)

Good idea. How bout

• Rock
• Soft Rock
• Hardcore
• Heavy Metal
• Hip Hop
• R&B
• Alternative
• Pop
• Adult

PoisonedV

Pretty much what I was thinking, along with IDM, EBM, Synthpop, and so forth. (Also seems I need to change my timezone..)
-FloodSpectre 18:12, 17 April 2006 (PDT)

Genre is a cool idea. Luckily we don't need to have them all hammered out ahead of time. If we just add the genres as we go and make each Genre category a sub-category of "Genre", they'll automatically be compiled onto the Genre page. For example, if you did Genre Rock as a category for a song, then go to the Genre Rock category page and just add that as belonging to Genre... everything updates itself (many thanks to MediaWiki).
For a good example, check out how FloodSpectre added Genre IDM to Proem, and how that itself is a sub-cat of Genre
-Sean Colombo 00:15, 18 April 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Alternate Titles

A lot of the "other songs by artists" are really just mis-labeled songs (example: CAKE's "Building a Religion" is really "Comfort Eagle." Do we still want to list the lyrics on these alternate pages, or is there a sort of standard way we can come up with to link to the real lyrics? Casualsax 05:00, 15 April 2006 (PDT)

I definitely don't think they need their own page. MediaWiki lets us use REDIRECTs though. Once a redirect is set up, maybe the link from "Other Songs" should be removed from the page. Either that, or we could indicate it's a redirect with an arrow or something. Like:
"Building a Religion" → "Comfort Eagle"
-Sean Colombo 12:32, 15 April 2006 (PDT)

The REDIRECTS are a great idea - once the REDIRECTS are set up, wait about a week or so and then remove the link from "other songs" - I think the MediaWiki software sends HTTP header codes on a REDIRECT which tells browsers to automatically go to the proper page next time (via the use of a "temporary" or "permanent" redirect code in the header). --Logan 05:43, 2 May 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Song Meanings

I know this is just asking for trouble, but can we write the meanings/common interpretations of songs below their lyrics? Casualsax 23:45, 13 April 2006 (PDT)

Hmm, that is a really good idea. I was going to leave that up to other sites (songmeanings.net does it), but that'd probably be an annoying extra trip for a lot of people. We should think of a header for that section of each song page... I think "Common Interpretations" does a good job of indicating that it's just educated guesses/opinions most often and that there is room for more than one interpretation on the page. I'll probably start adding Common Interpretations to some confusing songs really soon. Feel free to dive right in, yourself. Great idea CasualSax! -Sean Colombo 04:26, 14 April 2006 (PDT)

Sounds great! The only real big thing we need to keep in mind is to keep the lyrics easily visible at the top of the page. Otherwise we're being counter productive. 67.34.40.25 04:47, 15 April 2006 (PDT)

Another thought on the topic. If a song is a cover, we should link the common interpretations to the original artist's piece, unless some part of the song was changed or something else worth noting (ex: the almost-satire in CAKE's "I Will Survive"). Now that I think about it..we should flag covers, having them all link to the original song at the bottom, and then have the original link to covers. Possibly something uberbot could help us with. Casualsax 05:00, 15 April 2006 (PDT)

Good idea guys! Like, for example, Green Day's new album, American Idiot, it would be very helpful if someone tried to explain the meanings. Cuz, it's like a rock opera. PoisonedV

In a similar vein, what about concept albums with a story printed inside the booklet, accompanying the lyrics ? Fear Factory's Obsolete and Bal-Sagoth's Atlantis Ascendant both do this (" 10 October: 1893 The inscriptions on the tablet I discovered seem to be..").
I have too many questions and ideas, I think...
-FloodSpectre 15:27, 19 April 2006 (PDT)

I think a great place for the explanations of a whole album as well as stories printed inside booklets would be on the album's page. That will set it apart and give it some purpose instead of just being a copy of the album section from the artist's page. btw: Cool idea, I think a lot of people will love that.

-Sean Colombo 22:21, 1 May 2006 (PDT)

Guitar Tabs also? Those websites are stricken with the same issues as the Lyrics websites. The only problem I see with this expansion is that "LyricWiki" won't be very fitting anymore.

[edit] Great Site

Nice site, mate. Keep up the good work. Can I submit lyrics? Or can I not because I'm a human? -PoisonedV

Welcome to the site! Of course you can submit songs :) It might not be worth your time to do songs later in the alphabet than the bot has gotten to (he's on M at the moment I'm writing this), but he'll be done by about April 14th so everything will be fair game. Thanks for your willingness to help! -Sean Colombo

Was about to develop my own wiki-lyric site, and then saw you had already done the work. So instead of developing it, I'll be the anal kid formatting the apostrophes. Casualsax 23:41, 13 April 2006 (PDT)

Sweet... welcome aboard! -Sean Colombo 04:26, 14 April 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Favorite Bands?

• What's everyones favorite bands? I like Green Day, Atreyu, Hawthorne Heights, and The White Stripes. SO I'm pretty much into punk. And hardcore for Atreyu. -PoisonedV

• Awesome idea PoisonedV! I like Cake, Pink Floyd, Staind, and Pearl Jam. I have a hard time classifying those, but sometimes I feel like some Tool or the more techno-ish Orbital and Scooter for while I'm coding. -Sean Colombo

• We should put this on the community portal and have everyone vote for their favorite! Mine would be Pink Floyd, Jimmy Buffett, Savage Garden, and quite a lot more of classic rock bands (Allman Brothers Band, Aerosmith, Steppenwolf, Spin Doctors [yes, I consider early 90s to be classic rock, like Men At Work], etc.). Oh, and Ace Of Base has some good stuff. --Logan 05:48, 2 May 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Duplicate Songs

I've found that there are a lot of duplicate song entries on the site, under different spellings. For example I'm A Believer by Smash Mouth and I'm A Believer - Smash Mouth. How should removal of duplicates be handled?

--Leonaken 01:16, 2 May 2006 (PDT)

Song articles should never be titled with the name of the band in the title. Like in the second one you posted - look at the actual Wiki link: "Smash Mouth:I'm a Believer[...]". If we just do what the page did (add a template to the page, then songs with just the title of "I'm a Believer" will be displayed as "Smash Mouth:I'm a Believer" by the MediaWiki software. --Logan 05:54, 2 May 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Instrumental Songs?

Hi, I've started adding some of my favorite bands and I ran into an instrumental song, no lyrics whatsoever. I dunno if there's a standard yet for instrumental songs but I have an idea, how about if in the album listings, it's listed in plain text (ie not a wiki link) and next to it in brackets is (instrumental) with a wiki-link to a page explaining what instrumental means or something? anyone else have thoughts? --BlackFrog 02:56, 2 May 2006 (PDT)

I see no reason why this can't be implemented. But only do this for album listings, and only list albums that are primarily filled with lyrical songs. The point of the wiki is clearly to post lyrics, not a full-out database of all songs in existance. Hey...

--Leonaken 03:54, 2 May 2006 (PDT)

Yeah, point taken. The album where I ran into it has 2 songs which are instrumental and 10 with lyrics so this is not an issue for this album. Agreed that an album page with just instrumental links seems kind of silly for a wiki such as this. --BlackFrog 05:22, 2 May 2006 (PDT)

An alternative would be to use the {{Instrumental}} template in the song page (generally in that case, I also put (Instrumental) in parentheses next to the link to save a click. The main use in this method is that if someone just flips over a CD and starts reading song-names off of the back, instead of them just not finding the song listed on the site at all (and therefore not knowing whether the song has no lyrics or just isn't on the site), they find that the lyrics are in fact the empty-set/NULL-string, etc. since it is an instrumental.
-Sean Colombo 01:10, 3 May 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Lyrics Programs

We should do some programming/formatting of the MediaWiki software to allow lyrics software like EvilLyrics to grab lyrics from our servers. What do you think? --Logan 06:28, 2 May 2006 (PDT)

I'll look into EvilLyrics, etc. soon. I just sent out an initial version of an API that someone is going to use in the wild (it mainly just makes links now and can check to see if the page exists so it can color the links). I'll link to it from the site and write some documentation and requests for additional features soon. But right now I must sleep for a little bit. -Sean Colombo 03:47, 4 May 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Writers vs Singers

Has anyone considered putting the actual songwriter's name on the songs? For example, Rick Springfield's "I've Done Everything for You" was actually written (& later recorded) by Sammy Hagar. (There are lots of other examples, too, but that one comes to mind since I just heard it.) --MoniqueLeigh 14:30, 2 May 2006 (PDT)

Authors deserve credit just as much as the performers who put them to song, so I say this is a good idea. How about we do this: on song pages, instead of doing a simple "by <Artist>" header, we do "Performed by <Artist>" and under that "Written by <Author>".

--Leonaken 19:55, 2 May 2006 (PDT)

It strikes me that it might be worth including details of the songwriter(s) and, where available, the publishing company responsible for songs. For example Lennon/McCartney and Northern Songs. This would be in the interests of accuracy, reflecting the songwriters responsible for cover versions etc. It would also give credit to songwriters and publishers, perhaps back up the legal position of LyricWiki. But it would obviously be helpful if some sort format could be agreed for adding this information. Leonaken's idea sounds good - performed by, written by, published by?

--yashin 07:29, 3 May 2006 (PDT)

Most of the attributions on this site are just plain wrong. The site presents written lyrics, not performances. The lyrics are by the writer, who may also be the singer, but that's incidental.

--Bryan Olson

[edit] Database download

is there a possibility to download a Database dump like http://download.wikimedia.org/? then it would be possible to have all the lyrics on a PDA.

[edit] Searching

I usually try to find new music by listening to the internet radio or I might here a cool song on an ad on tv or in a movie. If I don't know the name of the song I usually do a search on google on the lyrics. So for example I'd search "There's a shadow just behind me" lyrics which would hopefully turn up a link to a lyrics site and give me the name of the song (in this case it's Tool Sober). I tried this search here (minus the lyrics of course, no need for that on a lyrics site) and I never got an exact match in the article text search results. Would it be possi

[edit] Singles & promos

It would be nice to list artists singles and promo releases, but how should we go about it? Stick them in with the albums and EPs or list them seperately? --Tene 06:46, 17 June 2006 (PDT)

[edit] License for non-lyrics contributed content?

Would be nice if it was GFDL compatible so we could import little bits of Wikipedia for artist intros. If no license if stated, then contributors automatically reserve all rights to their contributions. When this site goes down no one will have the right to move the content to another site. --68.170.20.23 21:01, 4 July 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Lyrics Format

I have seen lyrics posted in two ways. One with the "lyrics" tag, and the other with a singe space at the beginning of a line. Which one is correct? Maybe it should be posted on all the edit pages. Crazydog115 00:57, 6 July 2006 (PDT)

I was just getting ready to ask the same question. I think it would be nice if we could get over to having them all with the lyrics tags instead of spaces.

ADman 13:41, 19 July 2006 (PDT)

It is encouraged to use the <lyric> tag, having a space in the beginning of every line is a deprecated way to visualize lyrics. --Frontway 14:00, 19 July 2006 (PDT)

[edit] Translation format for non-English songs?

Although translating foreign-language songs into English is obviously a worthy, significant goal for any English-language lyrics site, I have yet to see a useful or efficient style employed on this site for easily viewing the original and translated lyrics side-by-side. The sort of style currently employed at Rammstein:Du Hast, for example, makes it difficult to see which line of German translates to which line of English, and becomes enormously cumbersome for any significantly long song. Is there an accepted method on this site for simply placing the original and translated lyrics side-by-side, which both makes the text more easily readable and keeps the page from growing overlong?

I can think of two potential ways to do this. If anyone has any tips or other suggestions, feel free to add 'em. First, simply using spaces or tabs (copy-pasting ones from a text editor works well) does a good job of spacing lines out:

Du                                     You
Du hast                                You have
Du hast mich                           You have me

The other option I can see is to use a simple table of some sort:

(By the way, it could also be potentially useful to have categories for songs that use non-English lyrics in whole or part, e.g., a "French songs" category, a "Korean songs" category, a "Latin songs" category, etc.) -Silence 01:15, 25 July 2006 (PDT)

Another alternative is to interleave the translation with the song:

Du
    You
Du hast
    You have
Du hast mich
    You have me