Callout to the community to improve the Wikipedia article

Hey,

As a community, one way we can give something back in return for the great product that is Dorico would be to develop the Wikipedia article, which is currently very short. It is marked as a ‘stub’, i.e. Wikipedia wants it to be expanded.

This is something that we are better placed to do as a community than the Dorico team are, as Wikipedia’s conflict of interest policy discourages writers from editing articles about their employers etc.

There is a help page guide to editing. A good starting point is to aim for:

An encyclopedic style with a formal tone…: straightforward, just-the-facts, instead of essay-like, argumentative, or opinionated… Ideally, all information should be cited and verifiable by reliable sources.

There’s a lot of knowledgeable people here.

Cheers.

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At least someone should try to replace the presented sample engraving. It does a tremendous disservice.

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That image of the engraving sample really is quite something, eh!

Would an example of condensing be better as an image?

Just bumping this to ask someone to edit the Wikipedia article, for heaven’s sake. At least swap out the image. I’ve never edited Wikipedia, so I don’t know how.

If you have a copyright-free image, I can edit the article. Perhaps an example of condensing?

PM’d you a screenshot from a recent project.

BOY!!! I see what you mean. Well, at least I’m not as worried about doing worse. I’d rather post a bit of a draft here first though than screw it up in front of the entire world. Feel free to throw rocks, just thought I’d try to do a part:

Dorico is a software product from Steinberg for creating musical scores, and for creating music WITH those scores. The product emphasizes that the act of composing is just one part of a larger workflow . The job of a modern composer may involve working with cinema, games, musical theatre, orchestration, publishing as part of larger works, for teaching or corporate worship, etc. And it recognizes that the process effectively extends to the musicians who will bring this music to life.

As an example: Rather than instruments, Dorico starts with “Players” who are given one or more instruments. This is because commonly in any real world performance there will indeed be players who play more than one instrument for practical reasons. By organizing itself this way, a player isn’t trying to juggle a piccolo part and a flute part on one stand, but has just one part with the right instruments shown at the right time.

Dorico next has “Flows” which are independent pieces or movements of music within a project. A project can have just one flow. But since you can be fairly certain that most performances consists of multiple pieces of music by roughly the same group of musicians, this arrangement of players and flows is intended to reflect that working environment with minimum extra setup for the composer and maximum consistency for the musicians. A project becomes a template for new music (flows) to be created as part of a larger production.

The second major characteristic of Dorico is a preference for automation over manual customization. Rather than nudging that one symbol over just a bit on that one stave (which you can do) Dorico prefers that you take some time in setup to tweak the rules for how you always (or most always) want that particular symbol or feature to be placed. The intent is that this investment will pay for itself many times over as the AI within the software automatically does the majority of the work for you.

A similar approach is taken to broadcast quality sound playback (whenever that is required as part of a composer’s workflow.) Expression Maps are a similar type of rules that are meant to control the playback of VST instruments from scoring markings - as opposed to drawing MIDI curves as you might in a DAW. Again you can draw such curves in Dorico, but the investment in maps is meant to allow the composer to largely ignore those complexities and simply write.

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I think it needs to be as factual and concise as possible. People consult Wikipedia for facts.

Lists of features, brief overview of ‘philosophy’ and style, and Version History are probably the most useful.

I did make a similar call to arms back in version 2 days: I added a primitive version history with features.

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I agree.

Yes, a section or sections on the philosophy/style would be useful.

@gdball , there’s some great content there, especially for the ‘Features’ section. Thanks so much for all that work! I will go through that, use some of the “just-the-facts” parts, paraphrase it in an encyclopedic style and add some section headings. I might do it after next week as I’m busy right now.

Cheers.

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Thanks @dan_kreider . Your image is now live in the article; it illustrates Dorico’s automatic condensing.

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Thank you!! And thanks to Stefan Podell (not sure if he’s on the forum). It’s the opening of the 3rd movement of his Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra.

That’d be @stefan.podell :wink:

I’ve just read through the wiki article. A few thoughts …

  1. I’m not sure about the automation section - it’s a threadbare representation of Dorico’'s features and it covers more ground than just automation. A brief list of primary features would be better.

  2. The warning from Pianist Magazine about" Dorico’s learning curve" mentioned at the end of the automation section is not reflected in the accompanying link. That’s normally a reason for deletion. I would recommend either finding an appropriate link or deleting it (and frankly the latter since every program known to man requires patience to learn the keyboard shortcuts).

  3. There needs to be a section on the different Dorico editions (Cubase has such a section). Cubase has a brief reference to its editions in the lead section and a more fleshed out reference further down the page. I would advocate the same approach for Dorico.

Hey, that’s cool!

FWIW, in that example, flutes, clarinets, and bassoons are condensed too.

Totally agree with points 1 and 3. Do you have a Wikipedia account already? It would be great if you’d edit the article directly.

On point 2, perhaps the wording could be improved. Perhaps as you mention there could be a section on primary features such as Dorico’s efficient use of key commands. This could include the Pianist Magazine note regarding patience/the learning curve, which paraphrases the third section of the article, ‘Note input made simple’.

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@David_Tee I’ve changed the ‘keyboard input’ section based on your comments. You make a good point.