Automating updates from other services

We’re very happy with new information being entered in, but fully automated imports have been tried in the past and always found lacking, generating more work for editors cleaning up/dealing with these automated imports than is deemed useful. We love the data, but our human editors are a much more valuable and scarce resource, so if we have to weight automatically importing a bunch of data against losing any editors since they can’t keep up with changes needed to be made after-the-fact, we’d rather not have the automated imports to begin with.

Also, if the imports can be automated, then anyone wanting the combination of the data sources would also be able to automated that combination, so the gain isn’t as large as may be perceived.

That said, I am currently working on a script to semi-automatically import Spotify data into MusicBrainz using MusicBrainz’s “seeding” mechanism. Human-assisted, semi-automatic importing are very welcome, as also evidenced by the large amount of importer userscripts the community is creating and making available.

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