Every now and then, there are wrong release merges being made by inexperienced editors and these errors are hard to fix. More importantly, an MBID is lost and wrongly linked to another release. From my experience, it is very rare that releases need to be merged because an editor who adds a new release would have checked if that release already exists. Release merges are usually used to clean up freedb imports or other types of automatic/semi-automatic data imports.
I think there’s a need for greater scrutiny over when an editor can merge releases. At the very minimum, I think beginners should not have their release merge edits applied without three yes votes. There can be discussion on whether this should be applied to normal editors as well. To ensure that these edits are being voted on without much delay, a new report should be made.
Having created a duplicate Release myself after searching MB and finding no matching Releases on the 1st 3 pages of the search results, and recently discovered a RG with 3 releases that were all the same (also a Jordi Savall album), I am not so sure about there being few actual duplicates that need merging.
But I think that is beside the point really, and agree that merges would be much better checked over, especially those by newer users.
Could you explain what you mean by
[quote=“silentbird, post:1, topic:352243”]
To ensure that these edits are being voted on without much delay, a new report should be made.
[/quote] ?
With merging being quite destructive that quite a lot information could be lost and hard to recover (with the original editor gone or quoted information no longer available), I second this.
Particularly for releases that had been there for quite some times, it’s really rare that they should be merged. (I do get the point raised by mmirG; sometimes new, duplicated releases will be added accidentally)
Maybe the new policy, if any, can take into account of this.
I think more controls on destructive edits are a good idea, but quite frankly I don’t think there are enough active voters to get three votes on every merge.
Anything to get destructive edits more visible compared to less important edits is a really good idea though. Maybe a link in everyone’s menu that goes straight to current open destructive edits (this is a simplistic example).