i find double data annoying especially if i have to do it in a certain way.
the best example is disambiguation for artists. i understand that when the same artist name is used multiple times, that we have to be able to diverentiate between them. but in my opinion, only if they have the same area we need to add a disambiguation. i find it annoying that i have to add “belgian rapper“ or “UK garage band” in the dissambiguation. the disambiguation should just be “rapper” or “garage band”.
but that will only be possible if we show all the info in all thet artist search fields.
if we show it like this:
“artist name [country code] (disambiguation)”
then there is no need to add the country as text in the disambiguation.
and it would remove the biggest frustration when adding artists to an event and there are multiple artists with the same name:
that i have to do a manual search in mb to see what country the artists are from to know which one is the correct one
other stuff i don’t like is when an event name also has the date in it. (i mainly noticed this on the boss events) the name should just be the name of the event. adding stuff in the string name that can also get retreived via the data is just annoying double data. the ‘artist at venue’ is in my opinion a little bit different. since regular concert don’t always have a special event name. and regarding the venue name that is used in the name and in the held at relation are sometimes different since the relation will probably be linked to the stage in that venue, and the venue in the name will mainly be the name of the building.
It’s the price to be paid to “help” editors select the correct artist, how much it helps I sometimes wonder. Sometimes it feels like the first (or only) name in the list gets selected. I subscribe to my artists and routinely fix wrong edits and add correct artists for those fixes.
It may be human nature to take the shortest path to a edit, but I think over time editors learn to do things correctly. Providing more information for the edit selection results in less work later, even if it’s redundant.
That said, for better or worse there is some amount of information “shoveled” into MB without thinking or checking and nothing is going to change that.
Besides which, an MB Artist’s primary area is not necessarily what the disambiguation comment is in the first place. For example, when two artists from Japan are named Anna, one disambiguation comment might be “Russo-Japanese” and the other is not.
i do alot of events and i make scripts to scrape event info and try to fill in as much as possible. for artists i often do a search by artist name. if i have 1 exact match then i assume that is the correct one. if i have multiple exact matches (or none exact matches), i don’t just automatically take the first one, i then have to manually look which one is the correct one. thats mostly when i do check the country and stuff. (i do also have a seperated function to search by name & country code, but most websites don’t put that info next to it)
A large number of artists don’t have country codes. Especially the small ones who only appear in a few credits. A disambig is really useful when trying to select an artist on a release.
i am not saying that we should get rid of disambiguations. im saying that if you can type “belgian rapper” as a disambiguation, then you can also add belgium as an area for that artist.
since the disambiguation is some free text thingy you cannot rely on the date always being the same format. it could be “belgian rapper” or “rapper from belgium” or “flemish rapper” (which is a sub part of belgium) this is all very vague.
i think it would already be very helpfull if the country code could be added like this:
i know this is adding more stuff to the UX but what else I’d like to see is a calulcated attempt to describe what someone does (i.e. they have 23 credits for Trumpet, they are probably a Trumpeter!).
Discogs used to do this way back, but not so much now - was useful for finding Mike Smith who plays the drums on an album
