Choral Public Domain Library

Over a year ago, I proposed to CPDL administrators to automate the lists of works on most text pages. These lists needed to be automated for several reasons, including:
1. Many text pages were not being manually updated with newly posted works, yet there are many hundreds of works that need to be added.
2. A large quantity of cleanup was needed in other areas (works with a changed title or composer, incorrect alphabetization, etc.)
3. Many pages have not had revisions to the manual list in years.
4. Comparing the manual list with What Links Here, there are many works in one list and not the other.
5. To clean up the manual lists, the tasks would be many and very time-consuming. Even in the popular Psalm pages, the number of interested editors and the time needed is dwindling fast. I certainly didn't have time to revise these lists on any but a few pages once in a while.

An example of this would be Psalm 110. When I accessed this page in late April, TextAutoList had 49 items. The history shows that for this relatively popular page, there have only been 26 additions to the manual list in the last ten years. At this rate, the page would be complete in 18.8 years, some time in 2043 – and this is only one of more than a thousand pages.

Several editors have said that we should work to preserve the useful comments. Most commonly added items include Voicing, Language, and text source, though there are others used less frequently. Voicing and Language have templates on Work pages, so those could easily be added to TextPageList, so I have done. Of course, items like text source cannot be easily retrieved; so I have put those off until reform of the text system makes that possible.

This was the situation until a month ago, where most text pages used the template TextAutoList. (Fourteen years ago another template, TextPageList, was created to automate these lists more completely.)
So I started working through all the text pages, automating them as much as I could without deleting anything. I am finished going through all of the 2,092 text pages, but I am sure there are a few that still need work. You will notice a few changes:
1. Many text pages still have a manual list, headed by "Settings by composers".
2. If the text page has only the manual list, then a new template has been added (TPLIntro) that will automatically add an automatic list if a new work has been linked to the page.
3. There are many pages with both the manual list and the automatic list (headed by "Settings by composers (automatically updated)"). You may notice some data duplicated between the two lists; I decided to keep these for a while, so that editors can better see what was done; the plan is eventually to delete duplicated information from the manual lists.
4. There are some pages with only the automatic list; for most of these, the original manual list has been hidden since it was exactly duplicated in the automatic list; eventually it should be deleted.
5. The best way to include your new work on an appropriate text page is to use the {{LinkText}} template. Please don't forget!

Comments and suggestions would be appreciated.

6. There is much work to be done in the manual lists: works with the wrong link, the composer has changed, works missing LinkText templates, incorrect alphabetization, etc.
7. New manual entries can be entered, but I suggest new entries only if the information is not available in the automated list; automated lists already include Language and Voicing.

2. All text pages should now have a TextPageList on them. I'm going back through them all to make sure everything worked right.

Wow, thank you Barry! This is a significant improvement.

1. Many text pages still have a manual list, headed by "Notes on selected settings". When I am done going through all text pages, I intend to switch the positions of "Notes on selected settings" and the automated list, putting the automated list first.

Way to go.
Excellent, Barry, as always!

For the last three weeks, I have manually gone through all 2,107 text pages, commenting out manual-list entries where the information is duplicated in the automated list. I have made some simple corrections as I went along, for example: standardizing the header to the manual list; adding header to the text when it was missing; and correcting misspellings in the manual list.
Here are some observations:
1. On many text pages, neither list of works is complete. In every case I checked (about 20 pages) there were works which were not linked to (or from) the text page at all. The use of LinkText is often sporadic, and in many cases works have not been added to the manual list. Of course I don't have time to correct all of these (thousands of them). It is this situation that impelled me to take on this project. I continue to think that we should work toward improving the automated list and discourage use of the manual list, except for pages where there is a clear need to maintain the manual list and an editor is willing to take on this ongoing maintenance task.
2. On most text pages, the manual list is completely unnecessary.
3. On some pages, works that don't yet exist on CPDL have been listed; sometimes red-linked and sometimes unlinked.
4. There are pages where the manual list had been carefully edited to include variations in text, voicing, instrumentation, or other characteristics. In general, I did not change these very much, often just commented-out duplicates or changed formats (columns etc.). In a few cases where the notes indicated language or voice categories as variations, I made more changes since language and voice categories are already in the automated list.
5. Some editors have put column templates within the Text template; need to move them out and use Text|Simple instead. Causes extra blank lines to be displayed, and will be a major impediment to automation later. This is an issue on work pages as well.
6. I have been converting MultiVoicing templates to Voicing, where the displayed result is the same (or nearly so) and categorization is maintained. So that the voicing appears in the automated list.
7. A construction like Voicing|SSAATTBB|SATB.SATB is inaccurate and misleading on a work page when the multi-choir voicing was clearly intended by the composer. I changed some of these, but there are probably many more.

Voicing tags like "MultiVoicing|3|n=2|1st=SAB|2nd=ATB" are handled incorrectly. Apparently the second parameter ("3") in this case) is cosidered to be the voicing. See, e.g., the second entry here:

https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Tollite_portas

Voicing tags like "MultiVoicing|3|n=2|1st=SAB|2nd=ATB" are handled incorrectly

I agree that it's not handled properly by dpl, but I don't know how to make it work. Maybe someone else does? The "include" parameter in dpl only allows one template at a time; if both templates are specified one is displayed in red. At this time, the solution to this seems to require expanding the Voicing template with the aim of eventually eliminating the MultiVoicing template. I am not prepared to tackle this just now. This is why I have been converting "{{MultiVoicing|3|n=2|1st=SAB|2nd=ATB}}<br>" to "{{Voicing|3|SAB, ATB}}" – which has the same categorization and (almost) the same display.

This is related to another issue with certain templates, such as Composer, Lyricist, and Language, where plurality is expressed in a parameter which is an integer number. (The work page you referenced shows this issue with Language.) I think these templates were designed before list functions (such as dpl) had been invented. I think I know how to correct this second issue, give me some time.