Is there anything underway about improving medium edits?
That’s probably the biggest place I run into editing conflicts. I find an issue on one track, enter the edit, and then if I find an issue on another track I have to cancel the first edit and reenter them both together, or the second will fail because by the time it goes through, the medium will have changed because of the first edit, even though really the edits were unrelated.
The only time it makes sense to block the whole medium is if you’re adding/removing tracks or anything else which could potentially affect other tracks.
There are no changes planned, because this works quite well already. Mostly, there are only two problems:
Changes to adjacent tracks. When one edit changes, say, track 3 from being called Foo to Fooo, and another edit changes track 4 from Bar to Barr, it may be “obvious” to a human viewer that the tracks are still “mostly the same”, but it isn’t to a computer. If the two edits only change non-adjacent tracks (e.g., 3 and 5, respectively), there will be no conflicts.
Editors don’t believe in it working, so they unnecessarily cancel and redo edits.
Yeah, I had no idea. I believe you that somehow it works in computer logic, but it makes no intuitive sense. How would anyone ever find this out, except by bringing it up here?
Of course, if a system of notifying users about edit conflicts was implemented, it wouldn’t matter much anymore. But I understand that’s a fairly complicated and long-tem goal. In the meantime, it seems like a LOT more transparency in the editing process would be helpful. Not just for this, but definitely for anything like this that works in a totally unexpected way.
By trusting that the developers that coded MusicBrainz are not completely fallible and might have given this enough thought that it would work, and thus let the edits go through and end up not getting a message/edit note from ModBot. ModBot should be fairly good to report back in any edits end up failing, so not getting notes from ModBot is a good sign.
I started from the assumption that it would work, but then I see a pattern of modbot messages and failed medium edits, so of course I get gun shy about medium edits. I also trust the developers to call attention to potential pitfalls.
I don’t have an encyclopedic memory of my edits, nor do I have any reasonable way to analyze the edit history to see “oh, this medium edit went through after another one, but this one didn’t.” You’re asking someone to notice that some medium edits fail and others don’t (I did), that the edits that fail are conflicts with other medium edits (I did), that some medium edits which might be conflicts don’t fail - which requires remembering two separate edits and unlike the first two doesn’t call attention to itself (I didn’t), and then to observe that the difference between the failed edits and the not failed edits is the space between the tracks.
Maybe someone would get lucky and catch all that on their own, but I think it’s unrealistic to expect that many or most would. I put that kind of detailed analysis into making good edits, not tracking my edit history.
