Your new message

Hello Rodomonte, thank you for your new message. As I told you, I paid attention to the edits you made and the motivations you gave, and I hope I understood what you were requesting me and your reviews became less cumbersome. As per your requests:

• "Please don't create new categories for totally forgotten operas which only have one file.": I had only created categories with one file only when a disambiguation was necessary, because there were, like, five operas with the same title, however I'll try and do it less often (although, 99,5% of the libretti belong to the "totally forgotten operas" category, so celebrity cannot be a very helpful criterion...).
• "If you create opera categories at least check corago for the correct title". Well, titles varied a lot, even between different edition of the same opera, therefore there is no "correct title" (merely the most commonly used), however I agree that using Corago as a standard is a practical solution, therefore I am already using it for reference.
• "Always create and link aproppriate wikidata items for new opera categories." I am afraid I did not understand what you are asking me here, sorry. Could you please expand? I never used wikidata before.
• "Don't create normal categories for objects, which only have the same name but don't really belong together. " Can you give me an example? I can't remember when I am supposed to have done such a thing. I am actually trying to avoid confusion between titles and common Italian names and words. I am just following the convention that I found when I started to sort libretti (bare title, without specifications unless strictly necessary): I don't like it, but I follow the principle not to undo what has been done before. If it depended on me, I would have added "(opera)" after every title. I am in fact sure that many of those titles, in the future, will need disambiguation. If we can find an agreement on the method to name categories, I'll be glad.
• "Don't use the year as sort key for theatre categories. That will never work." Well, in my opinion, the chronological order is the logical alternative when the order by author or title is lacking. Since WikiCommons is following neither (most of the times it goes by file title, which in some cases is rather quirky), I felt that the chronological order could offer at least some order. However, if we want to agree to sort everything by another order, then let's at least agree about which order, either by author's surname, or by title (the former would better suit a list by theatre, the latter, makes sense in author's categories). What do you prefer?
• Since we are at it, could we standardize also between libretti and librettos? Being Italian, "libretti" comes more natural to me, and this plural was already in use when I arrived here, however I don't know whether foreigners would rather like the anglicized plural. I don't mind which form to prefer, the important is that there be consistency. Currently we have both forms in use.

Thank you for your attention. User:G.dallorto (talk) 21:59, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

Hi G.dallorto, thanks for you friendly message. I will try to answer some of your questions.

• Correct title: I usually use the title of the first performance known by corago. Other titles may get redirects (if commonly used) or we can add them to the description.
• Wikidata: That's the place where all wikimedia/wikipedia projects link together (sitelinks). It also collects all the metadata. Unfortunately I could not find a good introduction for it. There is some information at Commons:Wikidata and Commons:Wikidata infobox help, but these pages don't seem very useful for beginners. In theory every category should have a Wikidata item, so it can be linked to other projects. In our case this applies mainly to operas and humans. During the last weeks I tried to identify all opera categories without linked Wikidata items. Many missing items did in fact already exist, but were not linked to any category. Others were incorrect or missing completely. It's a lot of work and very time consuming to fix them.
• Usage of the year as sort key: This can't work because you don't have control about the contents of your categories. There will always be new additions by other users who don't know about your system. Other editors will disagree (as I do) and remove the sort key. There is also no easy way to verify the correct order, if the year is not part of every single file name.
• librettos vs. libretti: I don't really care about that. The english version librettos is probably better, but as most existing categories use the italian plural, I used that too.

Greetings, --Rodomonte (talk) 22:33, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

@G.dallorto: One more thing (very important): Please don't add an opera category to a file, if that category does not exist yet (example). This is extremely error-prone. I think, many of the mistakes I fixed during the last weeks came from this method of working. As soon a the category is created, the files are automatically added, but often don't really fit (example 1, example 2). Also you usually add categories for the composer and the librettist. This automatically causes over-categorization when the opera category is created. --Rodomonte (talk) 10:43, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

Hello Radamante, Ok for using the title of the first edition and making redirects for the following ones.

For Wikidata, I am not a novice (I have been here for 20 years) but I never did it before and I don't know how to do it. If you stumble on some "how-to-create-Wikidata-pages" please address me to it and I shall study it.

Sortkey: well, this is what upkeeping is about. But I can see your point. However, if this is the case, some other solution must be found, because currently the files are haphazardly sorted by filename. Which is no sorting at all. I noticed that you are currently adding author names to many libretti, and this is a good solution. But I wonder whether we could put the surname before the name, so that the files get sorted by surname? This, does not need upkeeping. What do you think about it?

I remind you what I am doing. I am recovering the thousands of uncategorized libretti (just those printed in Milan alone, by now, number around 500, and new ones are resurfacing at every search I make) that have been dumped into WikiCommons from Internet Archive and Gallica. These files do not surface in any search for "opera libretti" until someone categorizes them. I am amazed at how, after one year, scores of new, uncategorized libretti resurface every time I search by a different key (of course every time I draw the fishing net, I also find files already categorized by you, which is why our works clashed). I search by publisher, librettist, composer, opera house, editor, and every time, even if I hoped I was done, scores of new libretti resurface. Of course, I am on Wikipedia and I know the work must not be perfect because other people will complete what I have left undone. This is why I leave "red" title categories. I need them in order to see, by clicking on them, whether other copies of the same work have been categorized already. I think they make no harm, they are just unused (yet) category, there is no need to delete them as you are doing. We can revise the whole work later, when we are done and get rid of the categories we shall never use, but the work, as you see, is currently in progress. So please be patient for a while.

What I ask you to understand, and to be patient about, is that I am currently working on quantity. I may have 20/30 results of uncategorized libretti per search at any given time. I cannot finetune on everything. Also, this is not Wikimedia's method, which rather says "Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow". Of course, I know a revision may be necessary. I am super happy you are cross-checking the titles and correcting mistakes, this is how work is done here. But my current task is still recovering the hundreds of uncategorized libretti from the dump, first. Which is extra-boring and repetitive. After doing it, we can work on finetuning. Or you can do it, after I added the new files to the storage we both have already categorized. I am OK with it, actually I am relieved you are doing it.

Of course I am trying to do everything well from the start, because there is no advantage in doing the same work twice, but this is not always possible. For instance, I wanted to check every composer on Wikipedia to add a short bio when I created a new category for a composer, but I had to surrender to the fact that new composers were coming out at a pace too rapid to match. Simply, that work had never been undertaken before, and it is a different task than recovering the uncategorized libretti. Soon or late that has to be undertaken as well. But I cannot work on both this and on the dump. I understand you would like everything to be perfect from start, but if we were ten people doing the job it would be possible, but apart you, I did not find anyone else interested in it yet. So please be patient until the new finds from the dump are reduced to a trickle from a flood, as they currently are. I am convinced we can find the way to work together without clashing, even if you want different things than I want, and not everything currently matches. My best wishes. User:G.dallorto (talk) 10:23, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

No, I don't think that's possibile. Do one thing (or few ones), but do it correctly. Linking to non-existing opera categories does a lot of harm. It is always incorrect (as I explaned above) and must be fixed afterwards. Detecting these errors needs much more time than creating them.

To the sorting problem: Category entries are sorted by lemma, not by title or date. Everything else is just confusing. Categories are only bags which can contain a lot of different things. It is impossible to sort them according to a self defined way. You can't keep continuous care of your many thousand categories. --Rodomonte (talk) 12:13, 17 November 2025 (UTC)