Wikidata has had properties corresponding exactly to most MusicBrainz properties for a while, although the vast majority of the existing music-related data is still a lot messier than that of MusicBrainz. So far there are approximately five album items (corresponding to release groups) which have edition items (corresponding to releases), although there are a lot more items (mostly singles and their tracks) which can be mapped one-to-one to release groups, recordings and compositions.
Most Wikipedia articles and therefore Wikidata items are about songs rather than recordings, since it mostly doesn’t make sense to have a separate article about e.g. an edit or even a live version of a song.
Still it has been suggested before to enable WD links for recordings too:
Wikidata items can exist without being linked to Wikipedia articles (per Wikidata notability policy points 2 and 3). There are now 665 items with a recording ID; in comparison, there are “only” 13,763 items for singles with a release group ID. I would think 4.8% is pretty good given that there haven’t been any actual data imports yet.
I’m not totally convinced by the “there’s no check” argument, given that the use of the recording property can be limited on Wikidata using constraint violations; and I’ve also noticed at least one MB release group with two linked Wikidata items due to the recent creation of edition/track [release/recording] items, although I don’t remember which page it was on.
That WD item is a pretty good recording example. If this becomes (or already is) common enough, I’ll be more than happy to enable recording WD links.
Edit: @Jc86035, I see in WD talk pages you’re trying to drive discussion in Wikidata towards a schema that kinda fits ours. That’d be sweet to have - if you codify it somewhere, let me know Also, if it gets codified somewhere and it seems people are actually ok with it, I’ll write a bit of code on our side to adapt to it and have WD for recordings too.
Naive friendly question: What are these WD recording items used for if not for WP? Why not referring to MB recording items in the first place? Both databases are community-driven, CC0-licensed, based on FLOSS, and supported by non-profit. Main differences I can see are MB is specialized in music and doesn’t have notability policy, but goals are essentially the same. Since you seem to know both ends, maybe you can enlighten me about this? Thank you.
I think he meant in general, not a specific.
But one example would be: John Smith has a WD page. One listing says “known for” and his hit song is listed. But the hit song doesn’t exist on WP or WD, so you create the page on WD for the song.
If you think about it, it is very similar how MB works - where everything we enter is its own entry.
That example doesn’t look correct as the songWithout Me (Q57903096) is a separate item, and artist are rarely known for a specific recording.
Yes, this is what MB does with area for now, even though it is not specific to music and it fits the notability policy of Wikidata. MB areas cannot be modified by everyone, these are currently voluntarily maintained by @drsaunde while waiting for a system that would use Geonames data or Wikidata directly.
To properly represent things. With how Wikidata works, it’s much easier to say “Release X has recording Y, recording Z, etc” as Wikidata items, even if those were to be mostly empty other than external IDs. While I (as an active Wikidata editor) would consider them much less important than compositions and artists to maintain, I don’t see an actual reason not to have them - but then, I’d like Wikidata to be the basically a general EverythingBrainz-y tool, ideally then deferring to other more specialized databases for extra info when relevant.
Also, if it gets codified somewhere and it seems people are actually ok with it, I’ll write a bit of code on our side to adapt to it and have WD for recordings too.