Live style: UK vs England/Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland

MusicBrainz Style
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There has been some discussion in the past* around whether to use “UK” or “England/Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland” in live bootleg disambiguations, but it has never been codified.

I am keen to add a paragraph of clarification to the Live bootleg style. Please give your feedback, then I will harass our poor ol’ style lead @reosarevok to make a call!

Option A: UK

For the United Kingdom, use UK, rather than England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland.

Option B: England/Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland

For the United Kingdom, prefer the more specific locations of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, rather than UK.

Option C: Both

For the United Kingdom, use the more specific location of England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, followed by UK, in this format: “…, England, UK”.

Poll:

  • Option A: UK
  • Option B: England/Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland
  • Option C: Both
0 voters

*Related past discussions:

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I agree that it would be good to have this explained explicitly in the style guide! The relationship between the UK and the constituent nations is a bit weird, and I am not aware of anything else exactly analogous.

If Option B is chosen, I would suggest also getting an area editor to switch England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland from “subdivision” to “country”. Both options make sense, and it’s the fact that the constituent nations are currently marked as subdivisions (along with the explicit reference to abbreviating UK in the style guide) that has meant I’ve been editing to replace them by UK in live disambiguations etc.

If Option A is chosen, we should also leave Option C available for cases in which it might not otherwise be clear which of two cities is meant (as per “States and provinces elsewhere are optional, and should only be added when they’re necessary to further distinguish cities with identical names.”) I can’t actually think of any case in which this would be necessary, though. There must be cases of identically named cities / towns, but I think they are all too small to be likely to appear in live performance information.

I can give a little context from a UK citizen for people who might not be familiar – most of this has no obvious relevance to a music database so I hid it, but it might explain a bit what is going on if you’re interested.

Details

The UK is a formal union of four nations (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) each of which has a complicated history, including periods of independence, possibly with different borders, or as part of a larger independent country. There is a government of the UK in its entirety, together with governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (but not England) which can operate independently in certain areas: which areas these are, and when the independent government was established, differs in all cases. (Legally, this is a bit like the relationship between federal / state governments in the USA, with England as DC, if DC had 85% of the population. We do not typically think of the constituent nations as being like states, though.)

For most purposes – the main exceptions being certain sports like football (soccer), rugby and cricket – it is the UK rather than the constituent nations that is treated as being “on the same level” as other less complicated countries. This applies to things like citizenship (you can be a UK citizen but not an English one, for example), membership of international organisations like the UN or G7, international dialling codes (+44 for the UK) and web addresses (.co.uk), the Olympics…

The sporting exceptions tend to be for reasons of tradition and history. For example, at the time of the first international football match (between England and Scotland), a UK team would have had no possible opponents. The first international tournaments were between the four nations of the UK (which at that time included all of Ireland), and so the four individual teams simply continued (Ireland eventually dividing into the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland) as more countries started to compete.

Things get weirder when you start also thinking about places like the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, but probably best not to go there. (I think these are a bit more like the French overseas territories, for example, or the relationship of Puerto Rico and Guam to the USA, but honestly I’m not sure.)

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As a Brit, I have always been someone who sees Glasgow as in Scotland and Cardiff in Wales. Seeing “Glasgow, UK” looks plain odd to me.

On a similar tangent “Wembley, London” is much clearer than “London”. When talking about somewhere like “The Empire Pool” or “OVO Arena” it makes more sense to include the town they are in.

I think it should be allowable to have either A or B as an option. If someone from Cardiff wants to make it clear they are in Wales then so it should be.

Newport is a good example. Newport, UK covers many towns in England and Wales. Newport, Wales being a good example of a style breaker.

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What’s DC?

Azertyuiop

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Wales is like Texas, UK is like USA. A country within a bigger country.

Wales \ Scotland \ NI \ IoM have different laws to UK, Different governments. Though also ruled from England.

Though to confusing things, England’s laws come from Westminster, London which is the same government which rules the UK… this can get confusing to normal countries.

The separate countries want to split off from being ruled by England.

Basically go read up on histories, kings and queens and many complex laws (but this will get OT in a way…)

The question should be more about how people refer to the locations in modern day.

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Oh, sorry – District of Colombia: Washington, D.C. - Wikipedia.
It is not part of any state and is instead controlled directly by the federal government (as I understand it, as a non-American).

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I wouldn’t seriously object to the guidance being that both are ok, although I would personally find the inconsistency to look a bit messy in the database. I started making edits to the disambiguation comments because I found lots of artists where some recordings had “London, England” and some “London, UK” and I thought it would be better for them to be consistent.

I think you’ll also find that different people from Cardiff disagree on what they prefer. I’m surprised that you say “Glasgow, UK” looks odd. When living in the city I saw it quite often, although of course I would often see “Glasgow, Scotland” as well. (The most common is probably just “Glasgow”!) I don’t know for sure, but it seems likely that this might be connected to people’s views on Scottish independence, so it can get politically heated – this is one reason I think it would be helpful to just make a decision about which style we prefer and write it down clearly, to reduce the potential for arguments.

I don’t think this is really true: none of the four nations has a stable majority of the population in favour of independence from the UK, as far as I’m aware. Scotland is closest but voted against when they last had a referendum on it, and recent polling still mainly gives a narrow lead for No (although the Scottish government is in favour of independence, unlike the Welsh one for example). This doesn’t have to make any difference at all to MB style, of course!

Good example! I guess we have live recordings from both the one in Wales and the one in the Isle of Wight (in England) at least.

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@raelthelamb we’ve had this discussion before… :laughing: So I won’t go on. Yes, politics. And difference of opinion. Which is why I can’t see why it should not be allowed to correctly name the country a city is in.

Newport, Wales is quite a bizarre example of style breaking. Though I think we are safe to assume that the Isle of Wight isn’t going to do an Isle of Man on us any time soon. Newport, Cornwall is more likely to break away before that…

Allowing both A and B options better fits reality of how different people talk. Not everything can perfectly fit a database rule.

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Ha, indeed we have! (And I didn’t have it very well as I recall, so sorry for that!)

As usual for me with style discussions, I’m more interested in having a clear guideline than in what precisely that guideline is – my comments here on how the UK is arranged are intended to explain the situation to people that might not know to help them form their own opinion, not to argue for one style over another. I certainly don’t think any of the options is fundamentally wrong. (For what it’s worth, I have a narrow preference for Option A, although Option B has the advantage that it’s what setlist.fm uses, so it would save me time when copying location info from there!)

Although it looks a bit odd to me, I would rather have Option C than allowing either A or B, because I would really prefer having one consistent result.

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No worries. Plenty of debates in this place hidden away in editing histories. Always makes me laugh when I stumble across an old conversation… :joy:

Personally I would never set a policy based on what another database does. Many of my own live disambig edits come from the actual Release. So generally follow the way the location was stated by the bootlegger.

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Hmm. I see “Both” is a fairly unpopular option, but it really seems like the best option for me here. Some Welsh or Scottish people would want to be seen as Welsh and Scottish, some as British. But nobody can argue that (at least for now) they’re in “Wales, UK” or “Scotland, UK”.

It’s also just four characters to add, so not a lot of effort for people who were entering the country instead of the… country that groups countries. And if one of the countries leaves, it’s a lot easier to mass-remove “, UK” than to figure out which ones now need to move to be “Scotland” or whatever.

So, would anyone really, really hate it if we did that? It also kinda matches the structure for US and Canada regions, which I know it’s not equivalent, but makes wording the guideline easier :smiley:

PS: if you think “Scotland, UK” is bad for people who feel just Scottish, trust me, it’s probably worse for Catalan people who get to be in just “, Spain”! :slight_smile:

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In Poland, from time to time the inhabitants of Silesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silesia want their Silesian dialect to be recognized as a language Silesian language - Wikipedia.

For now, they do not want to break away from Poland. :wink:

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Order of preference for me:
B (specific), C (both), A (UK)

I could live with any of them :slight_smile:

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I feel like this too.
England/Wales/Scotland/NI might not be defined as states, but as “Country”, the same as UK is defined as “Country”, but the actual name they put on these is often just determined by how someone defined it at a certain moment in time.
State in Nation relationship for the US is very close to the Country in Country relationship in the UK.

Oh, well, it’s a database, so I tend to ignore any sentiment concerning nations. I’d just reflect the official status at the moment of the live recording.

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I think I would be against having a hard rule regarding this. Especially where it comes to geographical names like Scotland, mandating a specific style feels like poking a hornets nest for very little practical gain.

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The “both” option is odd as you’d never actually write an address like that. You either address as “Birmingham, England” or “Birmingham, UK”. “Glasgow, Scotland” or “Glasgow, UK”

“Piltdown Farm, Glastonbury, Somerset, England”. MB already drops the county - which seems logical. Changing this to use both countries seems needlessly clunky.

Notice also that Wikipedia seems happy to just use one country. Glastonbury

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The English Wikipedia does, presumably assuming that English speakers know that England is in the UK :slight_smile: The French and German ones use both, for example.

I wouldn’t make such assumptions that everyone in the world knows that Wales is in the UK or whatnot, in the same way we don’t assume that it’s unnecessary to indicate that Texas is in the US. I understand it can look a bit silly to some - thankfully, if both names are there, it should be trivial to use a taggerscript to make Picard remove the one you don’t want when tagging :wink:

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That’s what I originally thought too, but @aerozol asked me to look into this because people were editing this stuff back and forward. And that’s a much worse waste than just having a guideline and getting on with it :slight_smile:

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Use B

Then again according to this Option A should be “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” :laughing:

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England is the word most French will use.
Same for Wales and Scotland (in French).

I rarely hear UK used by French, or maybe just by knowledgeable people, like journalists?

North Ireland is rarely heard as well, except from journalists and difficult articles about Northern Ireland issues.

I understand Ireland and Northern Ireland are very different but we usually don’t know much about Northern Ireland. Except that there is religion war in Ireland… :sweat_smile:

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