Wikimedia Commons request for comment on musical notation files

(Originally posted as an email to the mailing lists for LilyPond, the W3C music notation community group, and the Music Encoding Initiative.)

Hi all,

I'm a Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons editor (User:Jc86035). Earlier in November I opened a request for comment on Wikimedia Commons, proposing that several musical notation file formats (originally MuseScore, LilyPond and MusicXML) become uploadable on Commons, with the intention of eventually allowing audio and scores of some or all of the file types to be shown in pages like Wikipedia articles. (The MediaWiki software already has Extension:Score, based on LilyPond and Fluidsynth, but there are various benefits to allowing music notation to be stored as files. Currently notation is shown in Wikipedia articles as images or PDFs, or used directly through the Score extension.)

Your feedback on which file formats Commons should support would be much appreciated; several developers have already provided input. Currently, the discussion is also evaluating MNX and MEI (of which the former doesn't exist yet; it's not clear to us how these two formats would interface and if supporting both would be redundant). If you've never edited a Wikimedia site before, anyone can create an account and participate in the discussion. (If discussion continues on the mailing lists I will link to new posts, although it would be preferable to have discussion all in one place.)

Best
jc86035