Wikidata supports Musicbrainz Recording ID but not the other way around. Any particular reason or is this just an oversight?
Just guessing here, but I believe it’s because the Wikidata object represents the song itself and not any particular recording of it, and that maps better to a MusicBrainz “Work” instead of a “Recording”.
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As far as I know that is neither an established practice nor a rule from Wikidata’s perspective all though it might initially have looked that way to due to 1-1 mapping of Wikipedia articles about songs.
I have nothing against allowing Wikidata for recordings when the Wikidata page is about a specific recording. I haven’t seen many examples of that though, most map to the Wikipedia things and are mostly about works. Are there a fair amount of recording items?
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I see one problem with this: When you add a Wikidata link the system doesn’t check the “instance of” setting of the WD item so you can currently link a WD item of an artist to a work or release group.
I think artists, works and release groups are different enough that not a lot of mistakes happen, but if we enabled WD links for recordings I believe tons of links would end up there that don’t actually belong.
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MBS should really do that, though!
Good spot, I have updated a ticket where it could be usefully checked: https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-8333?focusedCommentId=46340&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-46340
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Not a massive amount, but the number is growing as WD editors are encouraged to separate works, releases and recordings.
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There’s now just under 500 MB Recording IDs linked on Wikidata and the number is growing. Any chance we could “return the favour” and allow WD links on recording items on our end?
I would prefer to have wikidata to link to works and not recordings.
Musicbrainz allows you to link a recording to a work and that can link to wikidata.
You can link back to the wikidata item you just need to do it through an intermediate entry.
I would like to look at those 500 entries and see if they also link to a muisicbrainz work and if the link to recordings is redundant.
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Wouldn’t that depend on whether the wikidata item in question is a work or a recording?
Also: On second glance I might have overstated the number, it looks closer to 300 when not counting all the discussions. reports, etc. linking to the topic of the MusicBrainz Recording ID.
What’s the instance for recordings even called on WD? I’d like to see a query.
PS: Found it. It’s called musical track. Here is the query with 374 results.
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Running this query and checking few random WD/WP pages clearly shows links should be to works, and some of them are actually redirects to an album (not even a song page).
So, i’m against linking recordings to WD.
When needed, recording<->work<->WD relationships can be used.
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If it’s not to much trouble, could you share a few examples? Curious to see how it’s being misunderstood.
EDIT: Nevermind, I saw the query now and will go check myself 