For MBS-14041 I’m trying to think of any situations where it makes sense to have a primary alias for a locale which is at the same time marked as ended. I cannot think of any, which suggests to me that we should just disable “primary” whenever an alias is marked as ended (in the same way we do if it’s marked as a search hint). But maybe someone can think of some weird edge cases which totally make sense, so I thought I’d ask for help first 
3 Likes
I’m not all up on aliases, and maybe this isn’t the kind of case you mean, but Gulf of Mexico type of situation comes to mind… names where it’s officially a former (ended) name, but it’s still the primary US English name in that it’s what it’s most frequently called?
Like, flopped or not yet caught on official renames.
Edit: Hm, I wonder how quickly, or if, “Lady A” or “The Chicks” caught on in common parlance. The radio station in my area changed right away, but I don’t know more generally 
3 Likes
I can think of a situation where someone has a primary alias for a certain period of time, and then changes the alias, which then becomes the primary alias for the period from that time.
Not many real life examples at hand, I can only think of: Prince at a certain point changed his artist name to O(+> (because it didn’t have a pronunciation, it was referred to as “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”) for the period 1993-06-07 to 1999-12-31 and could probably be considered the primary alias for that period.
As the symbol doesn’t have a locale, it can’t be marked as a primary alias, however. So this example probably is purely theoretical in nature. However, It is a situation where an alias can be considered primary & ended.
I don’t think a former primary alias should not be displayed, whenever it would occur.
I actually think it should be possible to have multiple primary aliases, as long as they don’t overlap in period, and all those primary aliases should be shown. (Although it’s use might possibly be limited to a theoretical situation, unless someone can bring up multiple real life use cases.)
As only one alias can be primary for a certain locale, I think we should ignore the ‘ended’ when it comes to displaying it. Let’s consider someone deliberately ended the use of a certain alias after a long career shortly before dying, the new alias barely be used. It probably makes most sense to tag the ended alias as primary, and I think that would be the alias to be displayed.
If someone changes alias, and is still active, or the the period using the alias is relevant for the career, I think the later alias should be primary, the previous one part of the history of that artist..
1 Like
to my understanding, the primary alias is always the current alias (or sometimes final alias, for ended artists and whatnot), unless we want to start tracking former primary aliases? I don’t see any reason to do so tho, at least not with the Primary tag, the dates we currently use are sufficiant in my mind
1 Like
Yes, that’s fairly common for example for people who change their surname on marriage. The old alias is no longer primary since the name has changed though, the whole point of a primary alias for a locale is that there’s only one and it’s the current one.
5 Likes
If that’s the chosen approach, it would be impossible to have an ended primary alias, indeed.
While we’re at it, can the name as entered in the database itself be defined as a primary alias for a certain locale? (Or as alias in general?) Or should this not be done?
(I did it a few times, mainly to define it as legal name, artist name or attach a locale to it, but it was disabled a few times, so I stopped doing this, but yesterday I noticed “Prince” is the primary English alias for “Prince” atm.)
1 Like
Yes, that should be just fine - in (almost?) every case, it should be correct to indicate that the entity name is also the primary alias for at least one locale
2 Likes
I already do this whenever I deal with aliases, good to hear that’s a good approach
it also has the added benefit of showing the proper name when artist credits are used for relationships, like here (specifically Vylet Pony)
I agree, I can think of no situation where an alias should be both ended and primary.
Doesn’t that currently result in “Artist (Artist, disambiguation)” being displayed for users using that same locale, or am I getting confused? That seems a bit redundant to me.
(Also, for users using another locale based on the same script, there will still be significant clutter due to redundant primary aliases being displayed, but that is a separate discussion.)
The primary aliases should never be displayed separately if they just match the artist name - if they do, it’s a bug
4 Likes
Then it’s probably me being confused because of primary aliases which are very close to the entity name, but not exactly the same (some examples, many of which shouldn’t probably even be marked as primary).
I think some of those are incorrectly entered as primary aliases. I’ve found quite a few artists where the legal name was labeled as the primary alias, even tho they don’t primarily use it (like on album covers and such). before today, I had no idea what EMI stood for, because they just don’t use their full name on releases
I think that’s a fairly prevalent issue, we just didn’t notice earlier because we weren’t doing anything special with the primary aliases
1 Like