Category talk:Artists
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Tablature formatting guidelines
Naming Conventions
As the database grows, it will be important to follow general naming conventions that prevent document clashes. The following conventions should suffice, though there may occasionally be circumstances requiring a different convention.
We will make a category, Tablature, to seperate tablature from the rest of the site. This will make it very clear that it's a tab or tab related page.
On an artists page, we list the songs of that artist below the apropiate album header. So you get this style:
Artist name Album name (date of release) * song 1 * song 2 * .. Another album name (date of release) * song 1 * ..
A tab page will look like:
<artist> - <song title> [[Category:Tablature]] The tab will be here. You don't have to repeat the title. If you want to state your name you might do that here or on the discussion page. Adding your email address to a tab may cause a lot of spam. Be careful. Try to refrain from adding too many of the lyrics. Lyrics are more sensitive to copyright issues than interpretations of the music. Don't forget to add newlines yourself. The text will overflow to the right of the page if your lines get too long.
This way, the tablature will be shown as plain text and the original tablature formatting will be preserved! Do not put a space at the start of each line. It's a nightmare to edit such pages! Please note, the page title should be: artist name - song title
Sort by Last Name
It is recommended for artists that use their given name to be alphabetized using their last name. For example Roy Orbison would be listed under "O".
"The"
Many artist names start with "The". The Doors, The Cult, The Clash, et al. It is recommended to alphabetize using the first significant word after "The" when posting songs for such an artist. For example, The Doors would appear under "D".
Legal Issues
Q. With all the guitar tab sites out there, I'm assuming there are no legal dangers in posting tabs/chords to copyrighted songs. Does anyone know for sure?
A. There is no real danger to anyone for posting tablature because we are merely representing how we think a song is played for others to study. The US copyright law states that reproductions of someone else's work are banned if they are "used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research." Since we are using these for private study, we are in little danger of legal pursuit. However, it is advisable to refrain from adding complete lyrics to the tabs. This does introduce a reason for copyright holders to start complaining. Especially since the recent news on the 'crackdown' on lyrics sites we need to be careful.
You may use words from a song to make the tab itself easier to read. But don't add complete song lyrics.
NOTE: I only say "little" because the copyright law (link below) is hard for me to fully understand. The particular quote used is from the Copyright law Chapter 1, sub-section 108.
http://assembler.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sup_01_17.html
Comments and questions
Good Idea
Using the wiki format for guitar tablatures is an excellent idea. One of the frustrations I've had with OLGA all these years is the database becomes stale as there are so many competing postings. The social nature of a wiki allows the tablature to evolve toward a consensus.
One thing I might propose is developing a convention for naming the tablature pages, such as this:
Tab:<artist>:<album>:<song title>
--JoeHolloway 09:30, 16 December 2005 (CET)
Issues with the "pre" tag
For some reason any where I enclose something inside a "pre" tag, it gets replaced with a funky string when I save the document.
Is this a known issue?
--JoeHolloway 19:07, 17 December 2005 (CET)
- I have the same problem.. Dunno what's goin on with it! --Snake 21:20, 4 January 2006 (CET)
I have fixed the pre tag problem by upgrading mediawiki to version 1.5.5. I also extended the formatting guidelines. We need to add a category and move pages around before it's too late, I think. --Eriky 14:10, 8 January 2006 (CET)
Organisation of the tabs
I see that we now have the category for the tabs, and the artists. I was thinking, perhaps we could have a category for each artist. Because when this section gets larger, it will be easier to manage the songs if they were in artist categories. I thought it would be good to do this if we were going to, before the section gets too large. Just a thought/point of discussion. --Snake 16:47, 10 January 2006 (CET)
Yes, that is indeed a good idea. I don't have time to change everything though.. --Eriky 18:19, 10 January 2006 (CET)
You're right, using categories is a better model than the one I proposed. --JoeHolloway 18:19, 14 January 2006 (CET)
