Morning all
I have found a very weird series in MB. It’s called Death by Pancreatic Cancer
So I think this is a very strange series. Are we now also going to indicate what a certain artist died of?
Death by heart attack?
I understand that people want to make these kinds of lists, but wouldn’t it be better to do so with their own collections?
These used to be tags, which was fine, but it being a series seems weird and not in the spirit of what series are for.
Maybe this is a warning not to listen these artists.
Thank you for your answer. Should I remove the artists from the collection? Or do you let the creator of list know that this is not correct?
I’ve seen a few of those. There are other “death by” lists. I assume the “age 29” list is around too. Or “died in air crash”.
It is the thing about Data. People collate date in some odd ways. I don’t see the harm in it.
Oke then we leave it like that :-), oww shoot there are lots of them whahahahaha
I assume there is also one for artists who have been shot… 
Dumb people don’t need lists to do harm… they can do that anyway…
This is hardly the only MB Series that is not in the spirit of what MB Series were intended for. Can we finally do something about this?
It seems @drsaunde, who was one of the people advocating for artist series, was imaging to use them for exactly that:
there’s also @drsaunde’s ‘Attended [X college]’ series, along with others, I presume (man, that’s a lot of series subscriptions, lol). see edit #82983365
I do like the idea of capturing much of this data, but I feel it might better be served by attributes (which we don’t yet have for anything but works). for example, we could have a “cause of death” attribute which might have a dropdown with many options, and possibly also allow for free-text? (that way we don’t have to set up an exhaustive list of causes of death, for example) or possibly a combination, that way you can specify “cause of death: cancer” (that way it could group together similar causes of death) but then specify a particular type of cancer “pancreatic” in a free-text field?
We should rather use the existing Artist studied at Place relationship for that…
It says:
We’re a music database, so we’re not really interested on which basic school a person attended, or where they studied a degree in architecture.
I think then tags is better for this kind of trivia lists.
Update: But really why not the relationship. It’s still better than the trivia series, in this case, I think.
I also think that these lists would be better to be done by tags or by collections. A lot of these things also don’t really make the artist anymore related to each other, other the basic fact that they are human.
I don’t have a really strong opinion, but having those as series seems pretty odd. Especially as there are more fitting options if someone really wants to collect such data.
Is there a “sing while shaving” list ?
I like the “collections” option. I agree it is not music-related.
It is a pity to see these series now being destroyed. 
Are they? Cant you make collections of them then and make those collections public. Maybe they will add another function where you can put this kind of info. It was not my intent to let them be destroyed. I didn’t mean for these to be removed, I feel guilty now that I said something about it 
I think removing them is premature. I know what I wrote above and my opinion hasn’t changed, but apart from a few different opinions I don’t feel like we really had reached a community consensus here.
IMHO the style guides should be clarified first to make clear how to handle such cases and what series should not be used for.
Also if these should be better made e.g. collections it might be preferable for someone who cares about those to create the collection first then remove the series.
I’ve been sticking to removing the “death by” and “arrested for” series thus far. I’m migrating what I can to collections, most of which are private as of this writing. I can make them public, but that might upset some people given the sensitive nature of some of them.
How can a collection upset some one. Its public now. Everyone can see it now so what is the difference. Everything will upset some one some time. If we dont do things anymore cos it might upset some one we might as well stop with MB… and with living
Collections are not as flexible as a Series. A Series allows an annotation to explain the connection. Allows background to be added. And it is visible on the release page. You can also add items to them either from the Series page or the Release page.
Collections aren’t exactly visible. Hidden where no one will look. So the data is only found by accident. No way to leave a nice annotation to explain it. Hard to work with as you can only add to the collection on the actual release page.
I guess some people just like “rules” more that data. Someone had spent a lot of time and effort to put together interesting data. This is certainly more interesting data than seeing yet another “100 albums you should remove from your collection” or 100 best albums from random newspaper series.
MusicBrainz is a database which allows us amazing ways to connect the data. We should make the most of that.