There’s an editor that keeps changing the unicode apostrophe «’» for the ASCII one «’» in an album release, ignoring the equivalence of both characters and the guideline that says that the former is preferred over the latest. If I edit it, he would just change it back. I asking for help to join the discussion.
The edits are https://musicbrainz.org/edit/56425413 and https://musicbrainz.org/edit/56425413
If you already explained to someone and still they revert all changes, maybe you have to report them, using the link on their profile.
There is another way to solve this issue. The API needs to get updated to allow character swap within the API.
There is a whole group of these punctuation marks that are “corrected” within MB to the more specific Unicode versions. So this gives us good data in the database following a standard. (I am NOT arguing against the Unicode pretification of punctuation.)
Problem I see is that the outside world uses this database for MANY different reasons. And much of that is via the API. So is there any way to have an option in the API that swaps data back from the Unicode version to the plain apostrophe, speechmark, hypen, etc.
We are only talking about a very small subset of characters here.
Personally I use MB data when I am ripping my CDs. I have to set the EAC ripping software to exchange many of these apostrophes, hyphens, etc otherwise I end up with some very odd file names. Nothing weirder than seeing two folders side by side that look identical… but then one realises that they are using two different types of hyphen.
If the API allowed the character swap to happen when data is queried and extracted then it would lead to less of these arguments.
If you use Picard, there’s an option to “Convert Unicode punctuation characters to ASCII” in Options → Metadata.