Template talk:Infobox Musical

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	Musical Theatre Portal Infobox Musical is part of WikiProject Musical Theatre, organized to improve and complete musical theatre articles and coverage on Wikipedia. You can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
Template	This is a template and does not require an assessment.
WikiProject Musical Theatre tasks: Help out with one of the WikiProject Musical Theatre tasks below. You may add your name to the Participants list to the right. edit this Open Tasks template Collaborate and work on the Collaboration of the Month Articles needing a content fork Mainly, these are articles on films and either their source or subsequent musicals. There are a couple where the musical needs to be "forked" from the source material. Feel free to add or remove as necessary. Important: If you split an article, please make sure that you move all the relevant links from the first article to the new one. To find which links to move, click on "What links here" at the old article and look through the list to see which links should be pointed to the film related link (for example, articles on actors in the film). Then, click on those links and update them to point to the film article. Thanks! Don't Play Us Cheap Roberta How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying I Married an Angel Lady in the Dark The Band Wagon - musical adaptation will to be forked after it opens in April.

OK, I'm not very good at template code so this may need tidying... but it's a start for non-Broadway musicals. Fields might need ammending too. The JPS^{talk to me} 17:22, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Contents 1 Revivals 2 In-depth guidance? 3 Comments from User:Drenched/Sandbox (originally called Feedback and comments on the above) 4 Subtitle 5 IBDB 6 New parameter boxwidth 7 Parameter validation new 8 Infobox

[edit] Revivals

If no one objects, I'll probably add a field for a mention of major revivals somewhere toward the bottom. —  MusicMaker 06:34, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

I actually do object. Adding a revivals section is being production specific. A show only achieves a "revival" if it had already played Broadway or the West End and then plays one of those locations again. Space for revivals is already included under the production field. --omtay38 14:31, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

I like the idea of keeping the Infobox short and sweet. -- Ssilvers 20:24, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Guys -- please notice the YEAR of the original comment.... —  MusicMaker 22:12, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

HAHA, my bad. --omtay38 23:21, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] In-depth guidance?

Would it be a good idea to have more explicitly detailed notes on this page as to what does/does not belong in each section of the infobox (e.g. our Article Structure page)? For Awards, what level of obscurity/reputability do listed awards have to have? For Basis, are we only filling in this field if the musical is directly based on a book/movie/etc. like H2S or Wicked, or do loose adaptations of operas count (e.g. Rent, Miss Saigon)? For Productions, was the final agreement to include concerts, special performances, and all tours? I was just thinking it might be a good idea to spell everything out to help with consistency. --Drenched 20:47, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Comments from User:Drenched/Sandbox (originally called Feedback and comments on the above)

Got any answers, new questions or issues to address, or other random feedback? Speak here!

See my edits above, which I hope are helpful. Responses to your questions: I don't think the distinction between equity/non-equity is important. The question is, I think, whether the production was really notable. If there are dozens of little tours, we don't want to fill up the box listing them all, but if, say, a West End show then had an off-Broadway run, it could be noted. I would say that notable previews can be discussed in the narrative, under "background", unless they were famous for some reason. End year: not in the box, IMO. But, what about number of performances?. City name should be enough, unless the city name is not internationally known or would be ambiguous. For instance, a production in Atlanta might not be clear to people outside the US, so "Atlanta, Georgia, USA". I would say, yes, orchestration awards, because those are the parts written. Another production might change them, but so what. Hope this helps! --Ssilvers 17:21, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Heya! I agree about not listing previews in the infobox, and listing all professional tours equity or non. About locations of performances...what if we just by default listed City, Country for non-touring productions just for the sake of consistency? Otherwise, you'd have to judge on a case-by-case basis what city was major or not major etc. and it might get confusing. About orchestrations though, that's a grey area because the score is written and I feel like the orchestration is in that, but can change from production to production, making it production-specific. Sort of. So maybe there needs to be more feedback on this award before we can reach a definitive standard. I liked your above edits, thanks! =) --Drenched 20:18, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Tony Award for Best Orchestrations Should this award be included, or is it considered production-specific?

[edit] Subtitle

Hey, kids. I've just added this thing to about 200 articles over the past day or two, and I think it needs a field for "Subtitle". Usually, in the name field, I end up doing something like "Carrie<br><small>the Musical</small>", and I think it would make it easier for future users just to have the field. I don't think that it's so radical a change that it would require our typical months of debate (:-D), and I don't want to have to stop adding it while it gets figured out, so, if I can figure out the code, I'm going to add it myself. If anyone really thinks it's a bad idea (though, I can't imagine why...), s/he can feel free to revert (but that would make me have to go back and fix all of the articles in between....). —  MusicMaker 02:57, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Oh -- and I took off orchestrations in the awards. I don't necessarily consider it overly production-specific, but I think the logical extension would be a need for a field for orchestrator, and I think that would just confuse people. (Because people are stupid.) —  MusicMaker 02:59, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] IBDB

I tried to add some IBDB functionality to the template, but something went wrong along the way. Possibly some snafu with IBDB's showID and productionID. Anyone else better with coding/parsing who could help out? — Hiplibrarianship 20:35, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm thinking that that might not be something we want to add to the template. The template has been designed to reflect the musical as a literary work, rather than focus on any particular incarnation. Stressing the Broadway production is something that we tried to stay away from, in the interest of avoiding systemic bias. Usually each article has the IBDB link in the External links section, so it should be covered in the body of the article. Thanks for being bold, though! —  MusicMaker5376 20:41, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Gotcha. My request is hereby respectfully retracted. — Hiplibrarianship 00:57, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New parameter boxwidth

11-Dec-2007: In the style of other infoboxes, I have added a new optional parameter "boxwidth" (which defaults to original width of "22em"). Changing the width of the infobox allows a more narrow infobox for wrapping wider text, as in the case of long words (such as "Hammerstein"). There is no such thing as "auto-typesetting" in wiki-reality, unless the box widths can auto-adjust for wrapping of long words, to reduce excessive white space of text-gaps. Another problem is formatting around "rivers" where multiple lines have spaces that align vertically into rivers of white space, or the same word is repeatedly vertically below itself. By slightly altering "boxwidth" (perhaps by 1em), the typesetting of text can be shifted to quickly avoid rivers and text-gaps.

The parameter "boxwidth" was introduced to allow "Oscar Hammerstein, II" to fit on one line and avoid the obvious 12-letter/comma text-gap. In general, narrower infoboxes tend to avoid such text-gaps of white space. -Wikid77 (talk) 03:49, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Parameter validation new

11-Dec-2007: I am adding parameter-validation to Template:Infobox_Musical to report some misspelled parameter names, such as "production" or "award" which should be plurals. If detected, a misspelled parameter will be reported in the format:

Infobox_Musical: Invalid keyword "based", try: basis.

The tactic is to check for common misspellings and report those actual words, suggesting the likely spelling instead. Parameter validation is rarely done in wiki-templates; however, it is easy to code, and consumes little space, unless a template is used over 200 times per page. For the common parameter "image_size", I simply nested the one-word alias "imagesize" to allow either spelling.

Again, there is ample space to code, at least, 300 parameter validation checks in an infobox template. Only repeated templates incur space restrictions, when used over 200 times per page. The template-buffer space is large enough to allow a single template of, perhaps, 23,000 lines to be processed (once per page). Hence, there is also ample space to put a few hundred lines of HTML comments to help explain/modify coding within an infobox template.

Checking for invalid parameters can mean the difference between seeing:

Infobox_Musical: Invalid keyword "award", try: awards.

or having the "award=xxx" text completely ignored without a hint of any problem having occurred. Other likely misspellings could be screened, as well. Computers don't frustrate people, unhelpful computer programmers do. About 99% of all typical computer problems could be avoided by simple methods: just like computer viruses, which were allowed to happen, rather than the rumor of seeming unpreventable. -Wikid77 (talk) 04:34, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox

For an active production, which image would be more acceptable for the infobox, the current playbill, or the original playbill? Annie D (talk) 05:11, 18 March 2008 (UTC)