Song Bihdays (now up!)
Song bihdays [sic] for all! Updated annually (or every 6 months).
Only focuses on song birthdays (mostly release dates) in the English Wikipedia. Not much about artists (whose birthdays should be reasonably easier to gather for birthday websites to be trustworthy), musical events and albums (though might add that one later on). Also may include songs with unknown/unspecific release dates, but these would only be mentioned in a separate category.
Made this because other song birthday websites just aren't complete and omit the majority of songs (including some famous ones like I Want It That Way). Also for fun.
- Figure out which wiki categories are needed (and collect all page links under them) ✅
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- Eurovision songs by year (some pages like this are not part of the songs categories themselves)
- Year of song missing and unknown (just to be complete and safe)
- Normal individual year categories (of course)
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Singles by year (every single is a song by definition, but of course there exist some songs which are part of the singles category and not songs)
- Debut singles by year (yes, there still exist some songs listed as debut singles but nowhere else in the above categories, even though some people have taken it upon themselves to address this (thanks!))
- Normal individual year categories (of course)
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- Find a way to extract information from wiki infoboxes ✅
- Shoutout to spencermountain's wtf-wikipedia, the only wikitext parser that correctly handles infoboxes (to my best knowledge). Thanks!
- Deal with redirects to albums or people or Eurovision or other pages ✅
- To my best knowledge, redirects to other song pages are rare and said song pages are already in the above categories, so redirects will be ignored
- Filter unneeded infobox data ✅
- Figure out which infobox types are needed
- Figure out which infobox attributes are needed (and determine order of importance)
- Ex: this song was written in 1927, recorded on October 31, 1927, released in October 1928, and published on January 19, 1929. Which should be considered first?
- Collect all relevant data and neatly arrange them in text files ✅
- Half-manually deal with some very ugly exceptions[1] and formatting issues not fixed by wtf-wikipedia
- Manage the ugly, inconsistent and very ugly date formats and parse them to a more structured one ✅
- Make a script for filtering the songs based on given birthdates ✅
- Figure out how to order the songs (perhaps based on pageview statistics) ✅
- Make the whole thing look reasonably good for the eyes ✅
[1]This particular page has the text "Fisk Jubilee Singers (earliest attested)" as its cover attribute, which is supposed to be for images. This is a unique exception, but there are many others.