Aliases: Surname as alias?

At https://musicbrainz.org/edit/62080159 a surname is being added as an alias.

My intuitive response that this was not a great edit.
Further consideration has me thinking that in some cultures the use of surnames as primary identifiers is common. And in other cultures the use of first names as primary identifiers is common.
So maybe having surnames as aliases in some Locales for some Artists does make sense.

What do you think of the whole thing?

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I’ve never had or seen a problem with having a surname in the alias table.

Does this alias have any purpose though? Searching for Brel will also find Jacques Brel and assigning a language to the alias is frankly ridiculous.

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I slightly think so too.
And if Brel is credited as Brel, we already have the ArtistCredit for that.

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I could see the point of an English primary alias “Jacques Brel”, to indicate “in English the artist’s primary name is also Jacques Brel”. But yeah, I don’t really see a point to the surname only. It doesn’t hurt as such, I guess? But it seems like a waste of time.

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As said on the original edit before, adding the surname alone as alias based just on ‘‘writing’’ credits (which are often truncated, for reason of missing space or just out of laziness) has no added value whatsoever and is IMO just cluttering the database. On a side note I also never use Artist Credits on ‘‘writing’’ credits that are simply truncated versions of the main artist name :slight_smile:

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@reosarevok: Do you really suggest to add “Jacques Brel” as primary alias for: English, French, Dutch, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and every other language using Latin script?

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If it also specifies a locale it could hurt, though. E.g. you have the artist “Jacques Brel” with an alias “Brel” dir the English locale, the artist might be shown as just “Brel” by software localizing artist names to English.

So while just having an alias “Brel” without locale ist harmless but also useless, having it with locale is just wrong. Aliases with locale serve a specific purpose of localizing artist names, and as such they should provide a legit representation of the artist’s actually used name for this locale.

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That’s the primary for locale alias, which this never was.

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I don’t suggest to add them, but if someone did I wouldn’t remove them either. There’s been suggestions before to have a per-script primary alias, although of course we’d need to be able to override it for Latvia and their Žaks Brels :wink:

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