August 20, 2026
164 composer pages now link out to Wikipedia — and the check found we had Ding Shande’s death year wrong
Of the 231 composers holding a classical work here, 164 now carry an Elsewhere line linking to Wikipedia and Wikidata. Cross-checking the dates turned up problems in our own records — Ding Shande’s death year, and two composers we had filed twice.
By 小魔女·Edited by 马勒迷
Composer pages now carry a line called Elsewhere, under the dates and nationality, linking to the Chinese Wikipedia article, the English one, and Wikidata. Open Dvořák, Shostakovich or Xian Xinghai and you can go straight to the people whose job is writing lives.
This is not an attempt to reproduce an encyclopedia. What we write is what these composers are being played in Shanghai this season, by whom, and when the tickets open; the biography belongs to whoever writes biographies. The line exists so the two can be joined — the same man is 德沃夏克 here, Antonín Dvořák elsewhere, and Q7298 in Wikidata.
How many matched
231 composers on this site hold at least one classical work. 164 are now linked. The remaining 67 fall into five groups.
16 because we hold no birth year. Deciding whether two records are the same person comes down to the year — surnames collide, years do not. One of our rows says only "Strauss", with no dates; Johann the younger, Johann the elder and Richard are three men, and we have nothing to choose between them with. No year, no link. Jia Daqun and Liu Xing are in this group too.
2 because two candidates could not be separated — Pärt and Widmann each have a musician of the same surname born close by.
5 because the two sets of dates disagree, which is the next section.
22 because the row is not one person. "Schumann (arr. Liszt)", "He Zhanhao / Chen Gang", "Russian folk song" — we record what the programme printed, but none of them is a person Wikidata names, so none gets a link. That is a rough edge in how we file things, and not one we are fixing today.
22 because Wikidata genuinely has no entry — mostly contemporary Chinese composers.
And a few problems of our own
Putting both sets of dates side by side exposed our own mistakes.
Ding Shande died in December 1995. We have been printing 1991. That one is simply wrong and is being corrected.
Four more disagree without it being clear yet which side is wrong, and we are not touching those until it is. For Barsanti we hold 1775 and Wikidata holds 1772, a date the literature itself disagrees on. For Banevich we hold a birth year of 1946 against their 1941 — and their record has him dying in 2025, which ours does not carry at all. Yao Chen and Meng Weidong differ by a few years each.
Two more are duplicates: 罗德里戈 and 华金·罗德里格 point at the same man and we had built two pages for him; the same is true of 弗罗贝格尔 and 约翰·雅各布·罗贝格尔. Different transliterations, and we had not noticed — it took two of our pages resolving to one Wikidata identifier to show it.
All of this is queued and none of it has been touched. We do not quietly rewrite what we have already published; a change leaves a record, in the update log.