Someone added the relationship “genre (fado) is named after the release group (Mãe, by Cristina Branco)”. This is evidently absurd because the genre is some 200 years older than the release group — and the album isn’t even called Fado!
But the issue is the relationship was automatically applied and can’t be removed (?). The edit page for the release group doesn’t show this relationship — which must be a bug, right? And the genre entity isn’t editable, at least not by me.
Thanks for bringing this up. I fixed the cardinality of the genre “named after” relationship types to allow them to be editable from the non-genre side (in this case, you should be able to remove it from the release group edit page now).
Thank you! That was quick.
I already put in the edit to remove it.
I’d argue that’s not a fix specifically (that’s IMO the right cardinality), but I guess it makes sense as long as editors can add a relationship with a genre without having genre editing rights.
So you’d expect it to be common for an entity to have many genres named after it? (The first one I thought of is Chicago, but that only has five…)
It’s not the first time we’ve had to disable cardinality for the UI to work correctly, anyway (see series’ “part of”).
Well, we have the same cardinality for all “named after” rels at the moment, and I think there’s some others that are a lot more likely to have a larger amount of rels. But that’s not the only point, the rel is a lot more relevant to the entity being named to the entity it’s named after so I’d expect this should be edited from that side in general.
Hmm, it’s hard to imagine cases where there’s enough rels to warrant restricting editing from one side, but I do agree that it’s more relevant from the genre side.
I could imagine a couple proper fixes: one would be to allow users to choose whether they want to load all (non-cardinal) relationships in the edit page, so as not to block them entirely (only by default). Another solution might be to allow normal users to load the /genre/{MBID}/edit page, but have all of the fields they aren’t allowed to edit be read-only. (So, you could add relationships but not change the name, for example.)
I would much rather adding genre rels was disabled entirely for non-genre-editors, but either of those would be ok - and the first of the two would be useful for cases where editors are confused about rels being missing that they can edit.
The same problem exists for instrument inventor.
BTW, there were two more genre ones
I would much rather adding genre rels was disabled entirely for non-genre-editors
I opened MBS-13737 for that. (I assumed it’d be desirable to do the same for instruments, though I understand we might want to allow some proposed artist-instrument relationships to be edited by non-privileged users in the future?)
A couple more “genre named after” misuses
So this is still an issue… Thanks for catching these.
Interesting that several of those seem to have been added by the artists themselves. Maybe beginner editors should be prevented from adding this relationship? It always seems to be added by people unfamiliar with MB, just trying to add the genre, not caring about what the relationship actually is.
(Also, at least this group should be removed. A 52-track digital release of which the first track is a video, with no link provided, the image is a random photo of the artist (or someone else), with the comment “Spotify and Youtube musics”. There is no reason to think this release ever existed.)
What I don’t understand is how these edits to add those relationships happen so frequently. But clearly there seems to be something that brings editors to enter those.
I found the discussion in https://musicbrainz.org/edit/121067713 specifically interesting. Here the editor who actually entered the relationship misunderstand chaban’s edit and complains (rightly) that “rock” being named after something releases much later doesn’t make any sense.
This makes it clear it was definitely not the editor’s intention to add auch a relationship in the first place. But yet something made it seem plausible for them to enter the initial edit.
I expect they try to add a genre to the release group or artist or whatever, and they don’t know how, so they see the relationships list has “genre”, they pick “rock”, the only available relationship type is pre-filled, they don’t even know what that means anyway, they just know they could select “genre: rock” and click “done”.
Going throw the cat amongst the pigeons here; what’s the point in that relationship?
Or maybe even better, can we set it so only those who are in charge of the genre work can use it?
Having it publicly available is going to be a constant stream of abuse from uninformed editors
This would be possible, maybe, it just requires a significant change on how editing works (we’d need to have a way to freeze certain rels depending on editor privs, since they should also not be able to edit or remove the rel once it’s there).
Some people like the data 
But it’s not just this one, anyway - things like “person invented instrument”, which has a clearer use, I expect, are still mis-used in the same way. So I tend to agree the long-term answer is “make it so these can only be used by people with the right privileges”.