How to become a location editor?

MusicBrainz
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I would really like to help with editing Areas.
There have been quite a lot of occasions where I’d have liked to:

  • Add a new area (e.g. some small village as a birthplace of an artist)
  • Change the “part of” relationship to something more specific (I assume every area should be part of the next bigger area and not skip one level right? So e.g. Queensbridge should be part of Long Island City and not Queens).
  • Add an alias (e.g. Shaolin for Staten Island)
  • And most frequently remove Wikipedia links (and replace them with Wikidata links shall they not exist yet).

Is it possible to be a location editor without being an auto editor, because I think I’m not quite there yet?

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There isn’t a formal process to become a Location Editor since, ideally, Areas should be fully automated somehow. There’s at least a single ticket in the tracker about this:
https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-8361

@CallerNo6 wrote a blog post about the current state of Areas/Area editing in MusicBrainz a few years ago (part 1, unfortunately a part 2 was never made :frowning:):

@drsaunde or maybe even @CallerNo6 may have additional input on this.

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I think you edit wikidata and then the changes are automatically took into MB, or something like that.

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That’s how it used to be (a long time ago), but since some people were changing Wikidata data to get the Areas to import into MusicBrainz, this was stopped. See the blog post by @CallerNo6 I linked in my previous reply. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the link.

[…] adding new data is a hassle.
To add an area, you need to:
[…]
3. Wait for an area editor to do the rest, and judging by the backlog that might happen sometime between “in a long time” and “never”.

So nominating new location editors - provided they know what they do - would be a remedy for this situation, right?
Is adding and editing area data complicated or comparable to editing other entities on MB, because if it’s not considerably harder I’m confident I can help and willing to go through tickets too.
Or could editing area data manually be obstructive in the long run if and when an automation process is set up again?

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“2. Make a long-term plan for areas and how they should be edited
3. Possibly open up area editing to more people, based on what’s decided in step #2.”

http://www.geonames.org/
“The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eleven million placenames that are available for download free of charge.”
?
They seem to be doing work that would allow input from MB editors.
eg
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/35113.page

edit: Of course I have absolutely no idea what form of data is required and whether it would take more than 5 minutes to integrate it seamlessly into the MB database.
:thinking:

Relating this to Events: The dream is to be able to pull up a map of an Area, select the time-frame, select the genres, and have all the Places with Events displayed. Heading down a path that doesn’t facilitate that would be disappointing - but , who knows, perhaps necessary in the medium term.

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I categorically distrust websites that don’t offer a secure https connection.

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For what it’s worth, whenever I’ve made a ticket to add a new area (with a Wikipedia link) it’s been done very quickly.

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