Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Classical music/Archive 24

Infobox for pieces of music
Do you think that there should be an infobox for pieces of music as I am happy to make one?-- Pianoplonkers  ♫ (talk)  16:29, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Cue the frothing... ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 17:06, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
 * What does that mean?-- Pianoplonkers  ♫ (talk)  17:14, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
 * It means that there has been too much talk about infoboxes already (cf Musicians Info Box) that you will likely get bitten by the rabid dogs for even suggesting it! More seriously: no the lead is supposed to supply the basic info anyway so why duplicate? --Jubilee♫ clipman  00:12, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Well it doesn't mean that, because that argument makes no sense. At all. But whatever. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 01:07, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
 * What does it mean then? More to the point "Do you think that there should be an infobox for pieces of music...?"  --Jubilee♫ clipman  01:18, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Hmm. What Pianoplonkers asked was "Do you think that there should be an infobox for pieces of music". Can I remind people that we do not have a policy on this. We have a guideline on biographical infoboxes. That's an entirely different matter altogether. -- Klein zach  01:57, 23 November 2009 (UTC)


 * A perhaps pertinent question to the proposer: what will be contained in the proposed infobox that would not also be present in a well-written lead?  Magic ♪piano 02:13, 23 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Question Number 2: Who is going to test, implement and maintain the box over (possibly) 3,000 to 4,000 articles? -- Klein zach  02:56, 23 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Pianoplonkers? :-) Actually, that question pretty much answers the original question... --Jubilee♫ clipman  21:44, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Quartal and quintal harmony
Please review this article and add comments at Talk:Quartal_and_quintal_harmony. I believe it needs a massive pruning and/or rewrite. Thanks. --Jubilee♫ clipman 00:15, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

To-do List Updating?
I've just done quite a bit of work on the Suite, Op. 16 (Saint-Saëns) and Prayers of Kierkegaard articles which are marked in the to-do list as needing Wikification. Now that I've (hopefully) solved the problem, how do I remove them? Do I delete them from the bot page? Thanks! Getmoreatp (talk) 17:07, 23 November 2009 (UTC)


 * It's automatically removed from the To-do-list once the tags are removed, though I don't know about that Botpage. More to the point, however, people have added stuff to the To-do page rather than tagging them in the correct place. Some of these additions are not even formatted correctly.  I'm also reluctant to edit a bot page...  Thoughts?  --Jubilee♫ clipman  21:52, 23 November 2009 (UTC)


 * As far as I can tell, there has been no bot run for the past 18 months, so there should be no problem removing items, indeed they will stay there if you don't manually remove them. These 'To do' lists have been little used in the past. They may be well worth working through, however I'd be sceptical about the value of recompiling them. -- Klein zach  22:44, 23 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I removed the items Getmoreatp highlighted. There's only one left on the "Wikification" page now: Prelude (Toccata) and fugue in E major, BWV 566.  --Jubilee♫ clipman  00:49, 25 November 2009 (UTC)


 * ✅ -- Klein zach  01:01, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Maybe I should explain that SatyrBot went through all the articles 18 months ago, identifying articles with tags. In most cases, those tags will no longer be on the articles, and I doubt whether there's much point in going through the lists looking for them at this late date. If the lists are useful, we could ask for a new bot run, however we have well over 10,000 articles here, so unless someone really wants to devote his/her time to it this, it might not be worthwhile. -- Klein zach  01:16, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Tfd: Template:Pieces-style
See here for Tfd discussion. (This template dates back to 2004). -- Klein zach  01:01, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Mathis der Maler (symphony)
Please review the move request at Talk:Mathis der Maler (symphony). I originally placed it in Uncontroversial requests but someone felt it might be opposed and moved it to the "controversial" section. Thanks. --Jubilee♫ clipman 15:14, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Annoucement by Museprof
I want to alert the Wikipedia community to a university class project that is underway. For the research project in my music history class, I have asked students to improve a Wikipedia article on a topic of their choosing from Antiquity through the Baroque era. These are the topics that have been chosen: J. S. Bach, Tallis, Purcell, Victoria, Dowland, Buxtehude, Frescobaldi, Florentine Camerata, Boethius, Madrigal, Council of Trent, Pope Gregory I, Palestrina, Vivaldi, Fugue, Handel, Josquin des Prez, Medieval Music: Genres; Theory and Notation, and Hildegard of Bingen.

Some editing may already be underway, and will begin in earnest over the next few days. I ask that you give my students some leeway during the editing process and wait until the dust settles before diving in to change what they have done. Of course, feel free to offer them constructive suggestions; I'm sure they will appreciate the help.

I assigned this same project last year and the year before, and unfortunately it caused a bit of a kerfuffle in some corners of the Wikipedia community. I am hoping to learn from the past and to proactively avoid a similar situation this time around. Please be assured that I have the best interests of both my students AND Wikipedia as a whole at heart; I believe that their aims are compatible. I am reassured, and I hope you are as well, that official Wikipedia policy encourages school and university projects, and states that it is better for Wikipedia in the long run for amateurs to make contributions and experts to fix any problems that occur than for no contributions to be made at all.

Please note that I have given careful thought to the guidelines for the project. The students may not use their textbook or the New Grove Dictionary of Music as sources; this is to encourage them to move beyond these sources and take advantage of a wider variety of materials. The students have three categories of edits to work on. 1) Existing Wikipedia statements with citations -- check the statement against its cited source for accuracy; if accurate, leave it alone; if not, change it. 2) Existing Wikipedia statements without citations -- find corroborating evidence for these statements in your sources, and add citations. 3) New statements -- find facts in your sources that are not yet included in the article, and add them, along with proper citations. The students are to make at least 50 discrete edits, divided roughly evenly among these three categories.  I had them submit their proposed edits to me ahead of time, and I have vetted them to the best of my ability in the time available (I did this last year and the year before as well).  Nevertheless, it's inevitable that some clinkers will get through.  Based on past experience, the students, though they try to be conscientious, don't always heed or understand my cautions and corrections, and I myself have probably missed some errors.  I would like to say that I will go over their edits with a fine tooth comb and fix any problems, but given the number of articles involved, that's simply impractical.  Fortunately, there's a whole community of editors out there who will no doubt provide any needed remedies. There's also a philosophical basis for me keeping a light hand with regard to their edits. One of the advantages of this project over a more traditional research paper is that it gives the students a real, worldwide audience (as opposed to an audience of one, the professor). This knowledge gives them extra incentive to work hard and produce good results. If they knew that I would correct their mistakes, that sense of responsibility would be lost, I believe.

I welcome your comments and suggestions.

Thank you! Museprof (talk) 20:17, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Reaction from Classical Music Project editors

 * I remember this from last year and, frankly, the results were not encouraging. Antandrus, Opus, I and others ended up wasting quite a lot of time trying to sort through the mess created by the students and in many cases I believe we simply reverted back in toto. Wikipedia is not an appropriate venue for class assignments. I would recommend that instead of making these edits live, that you ask them to print (download, pdf, whatever) the version of the current article and make their suggested edits in a format that can be submitted directly to you. Once you have reviewed their efforts, they could then add whatever changes to the actual article are beneficial. We are always very happy to welcome new participants to our projects, but using Wikipedia as a classroom prop is highly inadvisable and the fact is that many of their edits are likely to be reverted within minutes of being made, especially for those articles where there is an implicit (or explicit) sourcing standard. I appreciate your heart is in the right place, but I fear the possibility for disruption is too great. That, however is merely my view; I would be interested in hearing from Antandrus, Sarek, David, Kleinzach, Opus and others. Eusebeus (talk) 15:24, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, I imagine many people don't agree with your assessment that "Wikipedia is not an appropriate venue for class assignments" -- after all, there's a whole page dedicated to just that, and in fact Museprof here wrote about his project there. I do agree with the others, though, that many of the pages aren't really in large need of improvements and time would be better spent on ones that are. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 17:18, 29 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Eusebeus: could you give examples from last year where this did go wrong? I've only seen one example of last year's work: Florentine Camerata, which seems to have been done fairly well. The potential for good work is there, and I wouldn't like to discourage it. Perhaps use Workpages to set up initial efforts where we can all review them before they go live? Best, Moreschi (talk) 15:35, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Antandrus can supply many more as he took the lead on sorting out the mess. Here's the one I tried to tackle. I am also happy to have more participants and strong content additions, but putting the edits up live is not a good idea. Eusebeus (talk) 15:43, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I've dropped a note with Antandrus so he knows this discussion is happening. I took a look at that and although the prose is unclear, layout is peculiar, and the over-citing is severe, these are comparatively minor sins that we can certainly deal with, although I can quite believe there are worse examples. Perhaps a central workpage tied to this wikiproject might be best?


 * Side-note to Museprof: you might like to revise your article list. Josquin des Prez is a featured article, and though it would be arrogant to say no improvements could be made I think your students might struggle there, and Florentine Camerata seems to have been done quite adequately last year. Moreschi (talk) 16:07, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

I reviewed the edits made by TallGirl88, and I must say that I find Eusebeus's criticisms largely unwarranted. It is true that in the course of editing TallGirl made mistakes in formatting and her English was not always the most crystal, but she added a great deal of new and valuable information to the article, and put it all in the right places. She didn't, in my opinion, do any worse than I did when I was a starting editor on this project. TallGirl made the article better, and Eusebius (as always) made it even better. Isn't that the way Wikipedia is supposed to work? --Ravpapa (talk) 16:20, 29 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Request - There's not much we can do if a group of new editors want to modify pages. That's kind of the point here.  Thanks to Museprof for the heads up though.  If he/she could create a list of links to the articles they plan to edit then it will be easier for us to monitor the edits via the "related changes" feature.  Thanks.DavidRF (talk) 16:51, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually, if the students really want to be constructive, they could look for "citation needed" tags and find book or journal citations for those items. :-) DavidRF (talk) 16:53, 29 November 2009 (UTC)


 * (after edit conflicts) Greetings. I saw this post yesterday, and attempted a response then, but then canceled my remarks as intemperate instead of hitting "save page".  Now that I've had a night to think about it, here goes.
 * Museprof, I wish you had either posted your list of articles first for comment and suggestion, or solicited a list from us of articles needing improvement. We could have come up with a list of articles, all needing approximately the same levels of cleanup.  Some of the article on your list can be improved relatively easily, as they're not very good; others have been stable versions for a couple of years at least, and your students are likely to run into a buzz-saw if they try to make major changes.  One, as pointed out, is a featured article, and I remember how carefully we balanced sources to get it right.  Exactly where Josquin was when, and what he was doing, and indeed what is his work and what might be by someone else, is all very controversial still, and I sure wouldn't want to be an undergraduate, new to the topic, blundering in there.
 * Some of last year's edits were good, and I let remain. Others were -- otherwise.  Much cleanup still needs to be done for both previous years (Juan del Encina comes to mind.)  I completely re-wrote several of the articles after your students were done with them.  The 2007 edits were worse.  I hope your standards are higher this year.
 * While it's probably too late to change what you are doing, since your students have already begun (you will see I already noticed, and asked for help in advance, expecting this class project to come again this year) I still think it would be preferable to work on the articles in user space. However, not wanting to be negative, I have to say that the initial edits to Antonio Vivaldi are encouraging; they are of a much higher caliber than what I saw last year, for example to Luca Marenzio, which was so bad I wanted to tear my hair out.
 * And of course I'd appreciate some help with the inevitable cleanup from other members of this Wikiproject. Even if the addition of citations is helpful, we're going to need to check the sources for too-close paraphrasing, accurate understanding of the subject matter, and fix the prose style.  Cheers, Antandrus  (talk) 16:59, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I want to agree with what Antandrus said. It is entirely unreferenced. I cannot judge the veracity of his statements. Eusebeus (talk) 17:17, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Jackson, Tennessee? Please see Class project on Renaissance and Baroque composers (December 2008). This was the discussion that took place on the Composers Project in which Antandrus and Eusebeus (and I) were involved.

Reading this again explains the problems. At the time I felt rather sorry for the students, some of whom actually wanted to dissociate themselves from the experiment. I recommend that Museprof sets up his own closed wiki — it's easy enough to do this — to let his students experiment in a more student-friendly environment, or at least work in userspace as I think Antandrus suggested last year. -- Klein zach  01:35, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

This is going to be ugly. God damn it, I do not want to have to deal with this again. This is butchery of perfectly well-developed articles. This person is completely changing the meaning and does not understand the topic. Do we need to just let this be until the assignments are all "done"? Antandrus (talk) 04:34, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * IMO, if they make bad edits, you should fix them. It's not other WP member's jobs to cater to it. Just treat them like any other editor. IMO anyway. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk)


 * The students haven't come here of their own free will, so they aren't like our other editors. This is not so much 'professor (+students) v. editor' as 'professor (+students) v. reader' — I'm on the side of the reader. -- Klein zach  05:33, 30 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Ok, I have just wasted a good amount of time cleaning up Medieval_music and restored the original lede to Madrigal (music). Eusebeus (talk) 13:16, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * To be fair, the original entry at "Genres" before that editor came along was pretty tiny: his/her additions and your cleanup have added to the article rather than damaged it. Hardly time wasted!   --Jubilee♫ clipman  23:44, 30 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I've been away for the weekend and have just found this. I, too, have serious worries about it.
 * When I first started to edit, I played around with Pink Floyd and ended up getting a virtual beating. Why?  Because that article is a Featured Article just like Josquin Des Prez...  I also trod on several other project's and editor's toes before I realised I had to pull back, learn the ropes and find my self a mentor.  I eventually ended up playing around with articles on UK celebrities which were either simple lists of trivia or marked as Fansite and thus of no real interest to anyone! Holly Willoughby and Fearne Cotton are two articles I played with and even got praise for my edits to the latter (which was raised immeadiately to B-class from its Fansite designation).  I also grounded myself in all the Policies, Guidelines, etc I could get hold of.  Despite all that, I still make serious blunders, though I suspect these are not as bad as they would have been without all my research and edits to minor articles.  None of these students have had the learning experience we have all had - I suspect the Classical Music project members have all have a similar history here at Wiki.  To insist on "at least 50 discrete edits" per student, each of whom is inexperienced at Wiki-editing, will undoubtedly cause serious problems... indeed it has already as Eusabius and others have pointed out.  Also, the Prof is going to have to go through the edit history to find his students' edits, given that the worst will be be reverted, the not-so-bad will be tidied up and the ok will be improved.  Why, oh, why didn't he simply copy the pages over to a special userpage as I and others have done?  See my userpage for a few examples... --Jubilee♫ clipman  23:01, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I think it stems from a very common misunderstanding of what WP is about -- you see a LOT of people bitch elsewhere on the net about how "WP editiors are elitists who thing they are the judge of what stays" etc etc, when the problem is that Wikipedia isn't made for what was deleted/edited out. There's a sort of thought process that "since anyone CAN contribute to it, it means that whatever people think is important SHOULD" and so on. People want WP to be Everything2 or even TVTropes or whatnot...but that's not what WP is. And then there's the general ignorence that smaller sites LIKE WP even exist. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 23:15, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * E2 and TVT are places where anyone can say pretty much anything, indeed POV and OR are almost encouraged. I think you are right: the Prof has missed the point of WP, even though he is insisting on only cleaning up citations.  The students already appear to be hacking up perfectly decent articles by adding POV and by removing statements that establish context.  See Eusebius' (OK, I just wasted...) and Antandrus' (This is going to be ugly...) comments above, among others (assuming those edits were actually made by the students).  --Jubilee♫ clipman  23:32, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm looking at the student edits to George Frideric Handel: mainly adding citations, but one major date change in the lead without reference or explanation. -- Klein zach  00:25, 1 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, if it's anything like the last two years, some of the students' work will be decent enough quality to keep, but a lot will need cleanup. Have a look at what is happening to Boethius, for example:  while the student is adding referenced "facts", one at a time, he is doing so without any sense of prose style; they read rather like a list.  Just read the lede; you'll get the idea.  We, or someone, will have to do cleanup.  The professor of this class will not do a god-damned thing to clean up the mess.  I promise you.  He will not.  He did not last year, he did not the year before, and he even had the gall to complain about us in his presentation at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania this year; so we will be required to donate our volunteer time to mop up the spill.  (Sorry, I'm not pleased about this, as you can probably tell.)  I am utterly dreading what happens to Josquin, remembering how difficult it was to balance all those sources and get it exactly right, for details of his life and work are controversial -- how much is known, and exactly how uncertain various details remain -- and a student with one or two assertive sources may well unbalance the whole thing, in addition to shredding the style.  A few parts of that article were written by Jesse Rodin, Josquin scholar at Stanford University (editing under his real name).  And the edits so far to madrigal ... oy.  Eusebeus, thank you for restoring the lede; I spent a lot of time trying to craft it.
 * Jubilee, your comment about new users and 50 edits is spot on. It's a tough assignment, at least for those given a high-profile article (Bach, Handel).
 * On the other hand, I have to admit this: while I started the repair job last year in my free time between Christmas and New Year's with a good deal of resentment, when I was done, I was pleased, since we had new articles on Jacques Arcadelt, Luca Marenzio, Giaches de Wert, Cipriano de Rore, things we'd needed for a while anyway.  Maybe it's time for a rewrite of Palestrina, now that he's on the student list.  Sigh, Antandrus  (talk) 01:46, 1 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Just revert actively. Eusebeus (talk) 01:51, 1 December 2009 (UTC)


 * FWIW, I've registered our concerns on the School and university projects page. -- Klein zach  02:02, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

I've just reverted Madrigal (music) to the previous version by Antandrus just before this lot appeared. I have Twinkle... ;-) (In this case, context was changed, non-musical forms were added, and citations were broken. Others seem to fair better, yet...) --Jubilee♫ clipman 02:16, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Museprof writes above:


 * I would like to say that I will go over their edits with a fine tooth comb and fix any problems, but given the number of articles involved, that's simply impractical. Fortunately, there's a whole community of editors out there who will no doubt provide any needed remedies.

To Museprof: maybe you didn't originally intend it this way, but as it's turned out, you're acting like total jerk. You imagine that the "whole community of editors" is huge, and eager to spend their time fixing the mistakes made by your beginner students. To the contrary, as the discussion above shows, the number of editors knowledgeable enough to fix these errors is small, and the few available editors are stressed out and angry with you.

My own feeling is that you should have assigned your students an honest traditional term paper, and spent the time needed to grade it yourself. Dumping your workload onto strangers is a nasty trick.

As far as what classical music WP editors should be doing, I agree with what Eusebeus just said.

Editors curious to learn more about Museprof and his project may wish to consult the following links (I don't believe this is "outing" him; Museprof's identity is already pretty clear from existing WP pages.)


 * Museprof's professional website
 * Museprof's conference presentation on this project
 * Museprof's home department

Opus33 (talk) 02:33, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Where did the Union University project go wrong?
I suggest there are three main reasons why the Union University project has been problematic:


 * 1. Teachers setting Wikipedia assignments are expected to familiarize themselves with Wikipedia, however Museprof's contributions have been minimal, see here. (Apparently, even on 28 November, he didn't know the difference between a user page and talk page, see User talk:Museprof). So he's been unable to prepare the students, who in turn haven't understood even basic skills, such as signing and reading talk pages.


 * 2. Teachers are expected to start a project coordination subpage, see Instructions for teachers and lecturers ("Please create a project subpage at Wikipedia:School and university projects/Your project name in advance of the course.") This wasn't done, so there's no place for feedback etc.


 * 3. This teacher asked his students to make at least 50 edits each to 1 FA-class article (Josquin des Prez), 10 B-class articles, and 6 start-class articles, (see here). IMO this goes beyond what was envisaged by the schools projects. FAQ/Schools imagines Wikipedia being read for assignments, (see here). I can't find any specific recommendation to edit articles for assignments, other than responding to tagged help requests relating to undeveloped pages, see suggested exercises.


 * Unfortunately the students have got the idea that they have a free run of their articles, during the period of the assignment. ("I am just trying to fulfill my requirements for class. It's due Thursday and then after that it's all yours (well, it may take a few days before he gets to look through it so a week tops)! So if you could just give me time to finish this project and not change anything I do that would great." MaddieRhea before reverting Handel cite tags .)

I'd like to have Museprof comments on this (and the indeed other comments above), so I'll remind him about this discussion. I hope he'll consider terminating his project and not repeating it. -- Klein zach  01:40, 2 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Know what: I don't think Museprof gives a stuff... he left his "hello" several days ago and has failed to comment since, despite a prompt from you and one somewhat cynically droll one from Eusebeus (which went over his head, anyway)... What's that tell you?  --Jubilee♫ clipman  02:49, 2 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I think we should all bill our time to Union University. We're doing the work of their faculty and teaching assistants, aren't we?
 * By the way, it's possible they've substituted Heinrich Isaac for Josquin. They were contemporaries, and Isaac wasn't on Museprof's list, but those edits sure have that look.  And they targeted Isaac in 2007.  (The new editor is better.) Never did finish the cleanup.
 * I think Melodia's laconic advice above is good -- if you see bad edits, fix them -- and Eusebius, "revert actively."
 * Make sure you look at the beating the lede of the Boethius article has received. It is ironically reminiscent of what actually happened to Boethius at the hands of Theodoric.
 * Would I be violating the protection policy if I fully protected all the articles on the hit list until 3 December? Now that would be playing hardball.  LOL.  (Seriously, the way the political winds are blowing, I wouldn't dare do anything that controversial now.)  Antandrus  (talk) 04:04, 2 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Let's keep all this as polite as possible — while circulating it as widely as necessary. Relevant projects are School and university projects (here in particular) and WikiProject Classroom coordination (though that one is more or less defunct). If there's still no response we can write directly to the university. The relevant address is here.  -- Klein  zach  05:44, 2 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure if the professor told his students that they had to keep their work up until he marked it (by edit warring if necessary) or this was a misconception on their part, but this is entirely unacceptable. Kleinzach is right — this is not what is envisioned by the Schools Project. It's basically using Wikipedia articles as scratch pads with a complete disregard to the careful work by other editors which has gone into them. In any case, he can look at the edit histories for each article for marking purposes. Inappropriate or inaccurate edits should never be left in place, let alone to facilitate marking an assignment.


 * I also fail to see why he has not instructed his students to edit copies of the articles in their sandboxes before going live with their final edits. For one thing it makes the 'assignment' easier to mark by looking at a single version in the article history, and it also makes error correction by other editors easier as they can see at a glance all the changes which have been made to the live article. Also, speaking as a former university teacher myself, the education value of this assignment is drastically reduced by mechanical requirements such as "50 edits to article X" whether or not it needs them. If he really wants his students to learn how to write for a particular audience, and how to write a sustained piece of discourse, properly referenced, I'd suggest that he direct them to the red links on Music encyclopedia topics and assign each student to create an article from scratch. Alternatively, they can expand a stub article from Category:Stub-Class Composers articles or Category:Stub-Class Classical music articles. Voceditenore (talk) 16:56, 2 December 2009 (UTC)


 * "...the red links on Music encyclopedia topics and assign each student to create an article from scratch." That's a much better idea: they actually have to think and research their subjects given that most are utterly obscure.  Next year... possibly?  No?  Hm, we'll see...  --Jubilee♫ clipman  23:16, 2 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Indeed: and to work them in user space first, have them graded, and then as the final step move them to the mainspace -- and coordinate all of this from a central project page, listing the pages assigned to each student -- now that would be a project I would applaud rather than criticize. Antandrus  (talk) 23:45, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Student prose
Here is a sample of new student prose added to Thomas Tallis:

-- Klein zach  06:11, 3 December 2009 (UTC)


 * From this morning's Dietrich Buxtehude: "Buxtehude was exposed to the organ at a young age ..."
 * On the other hand, I see the student assigned madrigal has taken the hint and written the draft in user space. Antandrus (talk) 14:52, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh, dear. That's genius, pure and simple. It doesn't get any better, I nearly wept with laughter. Who would have thought this project could be such a wonderful occasion for schoolboy humour? Hehehe.


 * Merriment apart, this would appear to be the start of the Bach project. Moreschi (talk) 14:58, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Hello, although I appreciate the humor I think we henceforth should go easy on mocking Museprof's students. They are caught in the middle in this unfortunate episode, and I assume they are all trying their best. And not all of them are producing howlers.

A couple Museprof students (Maddie, and the one Antandrus mentioned) are sensibly copying the target article to their own user pages, in order to be able to edit without interference. I suggest we encourage the other students to do the same. Something like "Please copy the article to User:xxx and edit there--Prof. Veltman can find your work there and grade it." Opus33 (talk) 17:52, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

"I welcome your comments and suggestions"—okay: we usually have an undercurrent of trashy edits at Handel, but the previous week has seen a sharp spike in vandalism. The fact that the spate coincides with this assignment leads to only one conclusion. What disappointing behaviour by university students. Could I suggest that next year you select composers from the Romantic musical era?

 HWV258  21:47, 3 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I doubt if they are interested in later music, their focus seems to be on religion see here. (PS None of the Handel article vandal IPs are from Jackson, Tennesse.) -- Klein zach  01:26, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Readership
We also need to remember the tens of thousands of readers - many of whom are students themselves — who have been using these articles in the condition left by the Union University Wikipedia project. The Bach article alone attracts 132,000 page views a month. Here is a full list of the number of views per article per month:

-- Klein zach  01:34, 4 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Kleinzach, thank you for compiling this. It shows a couple of things:  1) we need to clean up the student projects as soon as we can (groan) since the likelihood of the assigning professor doing the work himself, let alone accepting responsibility for the mess, seems to be microscopic.  (Ever the optimist, still hoping I'm wrong about this.)  2) Interesting implications for priorities.  (I had been considering a top-to-bottom rewrite of Palestrina for a while now; maybe it's a good idea.)  Could we get a bot or some automated mechanism to compile page views for everything bannered with this project?  Articles that get a lot of page views, but generally aren't very good, we could put in a priority worklist, for anyone interested.  Cheers, Antandrus  (talk) 02:30, 4 December 2009 (UTC)


 * There was a Pageview bot, but apparently it malfunctioned and was blocked -- Klein zach  05:11, 4 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Mr.Z-bot (Task 3) is a similar tool and also lists the assessment ratings. See WikiProject Opera/Popular pages for an example. Voceditenore (talk) 09:13, 4 December 2009 (UTC)


 * It also (finally) creates a list of clickable links... Excellent!  Good to see some students are working in user space.  Probably got fed up with coming back the next day and finding all their work reverted...   BTW, I like playing with my organ and was exposed to it quite early, too.  I don't get it... LOL!  --Jubilee♫ clipman  04:17, 4 December 2009 (UTC)