Category talk:Music facsimiles

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Rename?

This seems like a good idea for publication pages, but cumbersome for work pages. If the latter still seems a good idea, it would be far less confusing to rename the link appearing on work pages Category:Pages with links to facsimiles. Richard Mix (talk) 09:26, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

I agree with Richard Mix, that this category is "cumbersome for work pages." As the description stands, it is ambivalent. Is it intended to show (1) pages with links to facsimiles, or (2) pages where a music file (pdf) is a facsimile? At the moment, the category is very incomplete for both concepts, since there is no automated way to populate it – and automation would be difficult, since many URLs cause errors when inside templates.
Also, the term "facsimile" is confusing, since most people would think of a "fax" (short for "facsimile"), a different kind of electronic document. I could not find the word "facsimile" in IMSLP's Score Submission Guide, and a related talk page actually discusses faxes as different from what is on IMSLP (which they refer to as "scanned scores").
Many users on CPDL would use the term "scan" instead, and both words are used in the description of this category, yet "facsimile" or "facsimiles" is used in text and file descriptions on 691 pages on CPDL (sometimes in the sense of "a printed copy"), in addition to the category assignment on 461 pages. This may be a result of the many Latin scholars here, given the derivation from fac simile. Duplication of words for the same thing is not uncommon, but this situation also involves confusion of meanings.
I don't see that this category is used elsewhere (such as a template). Do we really need this category? If it is retained, its scope should be clearly defined and a way found to completely populate it. Looking to the future, maybe the urls on these pages would be better in {{#ExtWeb:}} or a similar parser function. — Barry Johnston (talk) 14:33, 23 July 2021 (UTC)