I’m looking to understand the reasoning behind the style guidelines for the name of specific editions of releases. I haven’t been around as long as this discussion has gone on, and I was hoping to see the history/discussion on the wiki but I haven’t found that yet. I’ve put together some information that I’ve found so far that I think is relevant to the discussion and if anyone can fill in any gaps it would be appreciated.
We have a couple of documentation guidelines which elude to to how these should be named/stylized:
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Titles#Extra_title_information
“Additional information on a release or track name that is not part of its main title”
and
“Titles and subtitles of mixes/versions are formatted according to the appropriate language’s guidelines; the other parts of this extra information should be in lower case except for words that would normally be capitalised in the language.”
In the first sentence here we see that the Extra Title Information applies to both releases as well as tracks. We then see some guidance about the capitalization of words. There are only tracks provided as examples though. Immediately after that there is the subtitles section providing examples such as Greatest Hits albums, and the general consensus is that special editions are typically not considered part of the title of the album.
The Extra Title Information instructs to use the guidance provided by the appropriate language guidelines, in my case this is going to be English:
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Language/English
In this article we have some guidance for what words should be lower case, and when to capitalize, etc. These guidelines appear to align with typical English title casing for the titles of works.
Then we have guidance for the Disambiguation field itself:
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Disambiguation_Comment
“The text inside the comment field is not part of the title, and thus should be entered following the same capitalization guidelines as extra title information.”
Here we have explicit guidance to use the guidance of extra title information which includes all of the information above.
Combining all of these together, jesus2099 has provided the best guidance I’ve found so far:
" As it is not really part of the title, it better suits the disambiguation comment, indeed.
It should follow ETI style guideline
(« deluxe/legacy/expanded edition », in lower case)
(except proper nouns of course like « UK only edition »).
This disambiguation comment does show up in collections , by the way.
In your example, you would move it as Never Enough Edition → Never Enough edition in the release comment."
Here we have some solid guidance as to how it should be named, and where that name should go. So, though not exactly clear in all cases nor explicitly documented in the wiki, the end result desired is to lower case the name of the edition and place it somewhere in the disambiguation field.
So, with that settled, I’m wondering why that is the case, when in practically all other instances the name of the edition is capitalized.
There are several other music organizations which have naming guidelines as well, which do capitalize the name of the edition:
https://dmb.sundesiremedia.com/en/specifications/
https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/en.lproj/static.html
http://support.the-source.eu/kb/a43/album-and-track-title-guidelines.aspx
Discogs has tags for some of these special editions which are capitalized: Limited Edition, Deluxe Edition, Remastered
Taking a browse through iTunes, all of the albums I saw capitalized each word of an edition:
https://music.apple.com/us/search/album?term=deluxe%20edition
So why is MusicBrainz lower casing the names of editions?