Encouraging Adding Edit Notes

[anon18945670]

@rdswift

Missing edit notes seems to becoming more of a problem all the time, or perhaps I’m just becoming more sensitive to the complaints I’m seeing from other editors.

I think these complaints mostly come from me. Until recently I just voted “abstain” on edits that have bad or no edit notes, but that that didn’t send a message.
Now that a large percentage of all open edits are viewed by 2-5 voters I am more vocal as I really think it’s reasonable for the editor who already made the research to leave an edit note, so x voters don’t have to do the research themselves too.

@InvisibleMan78

What about a pre-selection of the most useful answers, like (examples only)
a) as written on cover
b) as seen on publishers website http://xxx.yyy.zzz
c) I’m the artist/member/involved with this work/release

Two of those I don’t consider very helpful - at least in many cases.

“as written on cover” is helpful if it’s written big on the front cover and ideally the voter uses jesus’ script that displays (small) cover art for each edit.
Otherwise each voter still has to click through to the cover art to be able to vote on the edit.
“as written on cover” + url to the relevant cover art is much better

“I’m the artist” can sometimes be helpful, but in most cases artists don’t use MB for a long time, so they will most likely be inexperienced editors so whenever I read a note that just reads “I’m the artist” all I think is: does the editor even know what they are doing?

@IvanDobsky

Suggestion - no edit note, or low quality edit note as judged by an AE, and the edit extends to 14 days.

This is more of a punishment for active voters than for the editor in question.

@IvanDobsky

Harass the editors into better quality notes.

I have thought about posting a “bad edit notes hall of shame” on the forum, but that wouldn’t be very nice.

@IvanDobsky

Sometimes there are cases when the edit itself is the edit note. When I am adding wikidata \ discogs \ imdb \ etc links I rarely add an edit note as the edit is self explanatory. Similar with typos \ apostrophe’s \ etc.

This is true. If the edit is so obviously correct according to uncontroversial parts of the style guide leaving no edit note is totally okay imo and forcing all editors to always leave an edit note would just be wasting everyone’s time.

@Skeebadoo

Whenever I add a new artist/label from within the release editor I always link to all the official social media sites for those… and subsequently leave the note empty, because as usual I’m too lazy to copy over all those links to the edit note; especially when they’re right up there in the r-s fields.

This is another example I think is totally fine. Especially when adding featured artists or so while doing another edit and you already have the edit note for the first edit in your clipboard.

What annoys me personally are merge edit notes that just read “merging into oldest MBID” as written by a script. Recording merges already do require an edit note so you can submit them, but using this script circumvents that.
The mass merge sctipt on the other hand mostly leaves helpful edit notes, though I’d love to see more additional edit notes written by the editors, e.g. like “same label” when merging recordings from different compilations as otherwise it seems like these albums have nothing in common.