I have a problem with one of the new editors. Name is Stargaz3r. He/she is uploading Dutch releases and in my opinion he/she is doing it the wrong way. This person is also changing Dutch song titles already in MusicBrainz. I have shown him the style guide several times but he/she insists doing his/her own way. Can some one please explain what he/she is doing wrong.
He/she also says that the style guide needs to be changed cos its not clear. Even I can understand the Dutch style guidelines and that says something about the guide lines
Hi, You are making it look like I am mass editing a bunch of titles. I have only edited a few titles of songs which I myself added earlier this week. Wanted to clear that up first.
I interpreted the style guide differently. In my view the Dutch style guide does state when capitalization is required but not when it should be omitted. I happen to know the artists of whom I edited the song titles, so I felt confident I styled them correctly (there was no cover art designer other then they themselves)
I once again ask to first reach consensus and update the style guide before we start mass editing a lot of song titles. No just the 10 or so I have written, but a whole lot more Dutch songs in the database have capitalization on each word.
I have no issue with this, but I would like to first have consensus and certainty that we are all on one page, so let’s update the style guide.
The guide line is very clear. Even I understand it and it. The guide lines even gives you examples. Yes there are a lot of mistakes in the Dutch titles but I’m one of the few Dutch editors and I only have two hands but we are working on it. Cos there still are mistakes it does not mean you are right. Again, the guidelines are clear. You only have to look at the examples that are given.
Hello @Stargaz3r, welcome once again, this time to the forum .
Not sure what you mean by this. Capitalization should never be omitted. If a word is capitalized in Dutch it also should be in the Dutch song title.
If you can get your friend to state that the capitalization of album and song titles was deliberate, then so they should be in the database. I do note that the cover bears the title “VANAF NU” in all capitals, whereas you spelled it “Vanaf Nu”.
Not sure what you are asking for here. What did you think was unclear about the guidelines? If you have suggestions for improvement, you are welcome to share them here.
I mean to ommit the capitalization as seen on Spotify Youtube and other sources in favor of following the style guide here.
Fair enough, some titles are written differently across sources even if the artist uploaded them themselves. The source I looked at had two capitalizations. We can figure out which is sould be but looks like we heading towards updating the style guide and just overruling that all together.
To determine the proper style I have done the following:
Look at other Dutch song titles in the database. Some of those show capitalization like I have applied. I was not doing something new here.
I looked at the style guide for titles and the style guide for Dutch. The Dutch style guide has a Dutch section and an English section and I now see the English sections says " Capitalize the first word of a title, names of people, cities, countries, etc. Use normal Dutch capitalization rules for the rest of the title." Yes that is pretty clear. But the Dutch section does not state that! The Dutch section only states the first letter should be a capital without stating that the others may not be. Let’s rewrite the style guide to make sure the Dutch and English say the same thing and are clear about when NOT to capitalize a title. Also let’s write something about knowing the artists intentions, and whether that warrens title case or not.
I agree with changing to lower case, but would strongly prefer if we first update the style guide so we have clarity and consensus on how song titles (not just the ones I uploaded) should be written.
That’s a clear sign there is no actual artist intent. Sometimes artists choose for artistic reasons a specific unconventional spelling or capitalization. But in all other cases the titles must be capitalized according to language rules.
Also it’s not uncommon that online sources which are primarily targeted at English speakers capitalize all words in all languages, ignoring all language rules no matter if they make a total mess out of the title.
Since I see no one arguing that upper case is a good thing in Dutch, I have updated the style guide to provide clarity. As of now we can say that lower case is the standard, and I wish anyone who want to fix thousands of song titles in the database good luck
@ Stargaz3r You keep going on, we have send you the correct URL with the correct information several times. Can you please explain to me what is not clear about the examples that have been given?
Again: For example Een blauwe maandag or Regen in november.
What is not clear about this sentence: Capitalize the first word of a title, names of people, cities, countries, etc. Use normal Dutch capitalization rules for the rest of the title.
@Tiske_Tisja I think you can be at ease now. Stargaz3r has agreed to adhere to the guidelines and edited them for greater clarity: He appears to misread them on first reading. you should follow the link he provided to see whether you agree with his modifications.
I am not sure I agree with all your changes. For example, you included rules for the spelling of Dutch artist names, yet these are not language-dependent and have their own guidelines. I’d advise to only add clarifications in the parts you misread, and to not introduce large revisions until you have acquired more experience as an editor.
It seems I have to keep going on to make you see that I DID read the style guide and the Dutch part of it WAS ambiguous. The English translation was clear but being Dutch myself I had only read the Dutch paragraph and that paragraph of the style guide was ambiguous: It said when to use capitalization but left unmentioned whether capitalization on other words was desirable or not. I checked examples in the database and found others had also used capitalization. I then proceeded to put a lot of effort into capitalizing as the artist intended, thinking I was doing something right. I find it frustrating that I get this aggressive attitude from a few people while I was following your style guide and the artist intent to the letter. I edited the style guide to make it unambiguous now.
I edited the wiki, but the docs on the website have not yet synced up with the edited wiki. Someone with the role of transclusion editor needs to manually approve the changes. Explained here: WikiDocs - MusicBrainz Wiki
I always intended to follow the guidelines, the issue was interpretation, and Tiske asked me to edit the database but I first wanted the guidelines cleared up to prevent a back and forth.
I wanted to remove ambiguity in all forms, but I will edit again to remove guidance on artist names. Edit: done. Note that the added exception about titles starting with a number was copied from the wiki discussion page (I dind’t invent that myself).
Thank you both for your contributions to MusicBrainz, especially because you can improve MusicBrainz in a language (Dutch) which I cannot. Also, thank you for this fairly civil working out of differences in this forum topic.
I don’t know enough Dutch to have an informed opinion on the Dutch language style questions you are discussing. However, I do read one thing which I do have an opinion about:
In my opinion, whenever a style guideline has content in more than one language, both language versions must give the same guidance. Whenever the language versions give different guidance, it is always a problem, and always worth immediate correction.
So, @Stargaz3r , I think you would have been justified to post a comment here saying just, “the English and Dutch sections of Style/Language/Dutch say different things, let’s fix that”, and that by itself would point out a problem worth fixing. And of course, fixing it would require agreeing on which section gave the correct guidance.
Welcome to MusicBrainz, @Stargaz3r ! Thank you for your six years of contributions to MusicBrainz, @Tiske_Tisja !
“Geel hoed!” I’m sorry, I pronounced that wrong. “Heel goed!”. (This was an actual language mistake my US-born spouse once made, when living in the Netherlands for a while.)
Hi! The changes to the Dutch guideline seem mostly good but I’d need an actual second Dutch speaker to review them. @mfmeulenbelt: any chance you can take a look?
@Stargaz3r: I reverted the changes to the artist intent guideline since they were not correct. Artist intent always overrides language guidelines. It’s just “artist intent” is not just “some cover has it like that”, it means “we know the artist actually cares about this being capitalized exactly like this”. For example, if half of the album had normal caps and the other half was all lowercased, we could probably assume the lowercasing is not random but indeed artist intent, and not change that to follow the language guidelines
Hoofdletters gebruik je alleen voor namen van personen, bedrijven, instellingen, merken, wetten, boeken, aardrijkskundige plaatsen, talen, dialecten, volkeren, feestdagen en historische gebeurtenissen. Ook afleidingen van namen en namen in samenstellingen schrijf je met een hoofdletter.
Given that the current guideline caused confusion it seems like a good idea to have a look at it to avoid further confusion. The dutch guideline is very short so I think it wouldn’t do any harm to expand it a bit. I think it makes sense to explain that ONLY the first letter of the first word is capitalized, except for the list of exceptions that can be read below that. This small change could have prevented this discussion.
What seems wrong is this part:
Dutch
“De rest van de titel wordt in kleine letters geschreven, ongeacht de intenties van de artiest.”
English
“The rest of the title should be in lower case, regardless of artist intent.”
This is incorrect, artist intent should be listed as one of the exceptions. It should probably redirect people to Style / Principle / Error correction and artist intent - MusicBrainz where they can read that the burden of proof is on the one who is deviating from the standard style guidelines.
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