The bootleg format is “YYYY-MM-DD: Venue, City, State/Province, Country”. If there’s no date, that’d leave us with “live,: Venue, City, State/Province, Country” which is clearly silly. So it makes sense to drop the colon. I think it makes sense the start is consistently "live, " but I honestly don’t care either way - I haven’t bothered to add this to live recordings now that we can properly specify the place and date they were recorded at with an actual relationship, and I’m not sure it makes any sense to ask users to enter it, given how much of a pain it can be to edit disambiguations en masse.
I would agree that we should drop the comma, not the colon. To my eyes the colon is the primary separator, and the comma secondary.
Agreed, but as jesus2099 points out, the disambiguation is more helpful in preventing improper merges than the relationships. It would be great if there were a way to batch generate disambiguation comments from those relationships, though!
The point is the colon is part of the bootleg formatting, while the comma isn’t, so the actual bootleg formatting for a case without a date would have no colon But I’m not against keeping the colon either, we’d just have to amend the guideline a bit.
Why not just drop the colon and use commas for separating every type of different information? This way people wouldn’t need to think about where exactly the colon needs to be and the formatting would just be the same for both live official and live bootlegs.
Yes why not…
I initially wondered about that colon among many commas.
I then got used to it and we have many such comments everywhere.
But it could be more simple as a guideline to only separate everything with commas.
Note what @reosarevok said about Bootleg formatting. Remember that this data is used in other places, and the original source of that format was a standard adopted from the bootleg world. That seems a logical enough reason to keep it as it is.
It is how other people are used to reading concert details. Yeah, our collective database OCD wants to make the colon conform and become a compliant comma, but then it won’t look at clear to read as now. When looking at a page of gigs the colon adds to the readability.
Please also remember that the colon is the standard for the Title of a live release too. Again an old standard used outside of MB, but helps massively on the clarity to read it.
A random example here under live releases of the Pixies Pixies - MusicBrainz IMHO think the colon makes that much more readable.
Yeah - that looks a mess. Please lets not start renaming everyone’s live bootlegs out there. It is very likely that other people are already processing bootleg titles knowing the date follows a standard.
Colons make the dates look more “squared off” and how my bootlegs have looked on my computers for many many years.
Colons are also used in subtitles. So there are other places multiple types of punctuation are used. Using different types of punctuation aids reading clarity.
Lets break down the original question in a different way.
live, date: location
The "live, " is only tagged on there as an extension from how bootleg titles were standardised. The location field can have zero or more commas. The date could be just a year. The colon is showing a divider in a standard way.
live, 2002: London
live, 2001-10-01: Brixton Academy, London, UK
live, 2001-10-02: Brixton Academy, Brixton, London, UK
live, 2018-06-07: Barclaycard Festival, Hyde Park, London, UK
The colon allows the human eye to divide the text cleanly. Also anyone processing the text through a computer elsewhere has an easy divider to work with.
(Darn it - I need to not keep getting into these debates )
I am talking about seeing the titles on the releases in the tags. And therefore in other databases that refer to my music collection.
I’m trying to avoid the tagging debate here. Not what I meant. It is the data use outside of MB. So my media centre reads the title from MB in a standard format. And the titles are in that format, so the disambiguation text should be in the identical format. Especially as the location part can have a variable number of commas.
live, London
live, Brixton Academy, Brixton, London, UK
The colon is part of the date.
So that means that the following could be argued as wrong
live: Los Angeles, CA, USA
BUT there is a valid argument to say that is a sub-title. I can see how someone could try and argue it from that formatting rule. Though generally I think it should be a comma there.
But I’m not against keeping the colon either, we’d just have to amend the guideline a bit.
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