Ministry of sound releases changes

Someone has changed all the Ministry of sound label release titles in the last month or so

I and others have spend many months over the years sorting this out in the past to have a generally accepted standard for the titles (since at least 2011 from the annotation) of having the name Ministry of Sound in the title for these releases.

Has some style guidelines changed that prohibits this practice. It had been agreed for ages and suddenly they all change, not sure exactly when but I presume it by this user that made the latest annotation.
https://musicbrainz.org/user/wcw1966/report

I am other have spend many months over the years sorting this out in the past to have a generally accepted term taht no-one has questioned and I am sure has been talked about on the previous forums.

Can someone enlighten me?! And how do we go about reverting the changes that have been made?

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Looks like @Mitch2323 made a lot of edits.
Also tagging @wcw1966 because you’ve linked to them.

If you are invested or have put a lot of time into an entity, I would definitely subscribe and vote to catch this stuff early…

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Yeah I do subscribe to some but a label is a bit much to subscribe to. And i wasn’t expecting such a radical change for a long established community standard.

You don’t have to vote on everything you subscribe to, you can just keep an eye on it in general.
In any case most of those edits seem like they have 3 yes votes so hopefully some of those people pop up here and explain why they agree with the change as well (@chabreyflint @otters61 @dragonzeron)

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I understand how the subscriptions and voting work I just don’t think there was a need for it subscribing to a label.

Although they were voted on I am still surprised these editors would make such a radical change without any thought for discussing it. That is generally what we do here. I knew we have voting but for more controversial stuff we have (or at least had) a tendency to discuss them.

I wonder if any if these editors actually own any of this music or entered any in the past. I prefer to enter data that I know and understand there are always nuanced edge cases that are better sorted out by people that understand that area of “expertise”

Was told to do so (can’t find the edit now) and followed, because of title styleguide and annotation.

For me it was clear, that “Ministry of Sound” is only a label and brandmark. We don’t have much covers, but here MoS isn’t part of the album title.

MB is a living database. Styleguides can change (see “feat.” styleguide).

Was this an official guideline?

Oh don’t start about the feat. stuff…

Can you point to the guidelines that changed?

I too am annoyed that a few editors have changed the comment on the label and then used this to change almost all the releases to match this new rule.

IT was a consensus to include the label in the release titles.
Though no style guides that explicitly say it is ok years of editing has proven that is what those that care about that label agree to follow our own style guide and include the label in the release titles.

It is something that you can potentially fix in a user script or a plugin but that may not work well for all releases as not all releases by the label are compilations.

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No guideline changed about it - looking at that cover, I’m surprised this was ever titled Ministry of Sound: Something, unless it’s printed like that on the spine, though. Anyone just looking at an edit removing Ministry of Sound without deeper knowledge of this specific label would probably have voted yes, in that situation. Especially because the original annotation predates series and specifies this might change in the future - with series being a thing, this seems unnecessary. But I don’t know enough about this series in particular to tell much.

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Can you point me to the community standard on this please

The edits were on for 6 days they were open to discussion and I based my yes vote on my interpretation of the official style guidelines. I do own serveral mos releases. @dns_server states that those who care about the label follow your own style guideline related imo to interpretation and as I said early if someone who had a deeper understanding of the label had commented before the edit were accepted then it would have been open to discussion

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I disagree that with series this is now redundant. I probably commented more than any other when you first mentioned the series on the forums. And I pointed out the floors in it, fantastically useful for information in a database concept and I have added many (for compilations series especially) but there is no way to tag it with the desirable/correct information, there will always be redundant info. It has always been an issue and I raised it at per-series as a a potential issue. I likely used Ministry of sound compilation releases in examples there too.

(Sorry I cannot find your post on the old forums. (Anyone know a way of searching the archive?))

Anyway that is a side point and we can start another thread about it if you want to discuss further.

I understand there were votes and they were agreed and I don’t want to single out individual editors here as if you just looked at that without a deeper understanding of the label conventions then I can see how you would vote the way you did.

Also unless you are looking at all times for votes like this you could easily not notice the change. Voting is the best we have got but hopefully we can all understand that sometimes things do get through. (I only noticed as I was about to add another one https://www.amazon.co.uk/Laidback-Beats-2017-Ministry-Sound-x/dp/B071JYG9V4 that I bought today and compilations like this are amongst the most neglected in Musicbranz and I know it will take about an hour to add it. No low hanging fruit to increase the edit counts for me.)

I am not sure what more we could have done as we had a detailed annotation from 2011 that was changed to reflect to there interpretation of the style guidelines with an implication that the style guidelines have changed (ignoring the previous one) that someone wanted it may have been seemed accurate to the cover art purists.
And @Mitch2323 from what I can understand just looked at the short annotation that was recently edited and not the previous stuff further down.

I can understand how it all happened and how things have snowballed but I hope you can see the annoyance with what happened from my point of view. If something like this was to change we should discuss it first, it is a major change to the way hundreds of releases are done and have been for years.

And another question technically is it possible to revert these changes?! (presuming that we agree we want to)

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Changing them back is easy enough, just change the titles and wait 7 days for votes if that is what we agree to.

Of course we can do it that way. I was referring to more technical methods other open-data projects, wikipedia, openstreetmap, etc have ways of reverting changes on mass. I wasn’t sure if we had anything like this.

I believe ultimately that is where MB wants to head (functionality to revert to old versions), until then we unfortunately just have subscriptions and voting.

Have to say that I am impressed by the civility of the discussion here, even though a lot of hours of work are involved in either side. Keep it up :blush:

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See the below for a selection of covers and spines
New photo by Daniel Sobey
New photo by Daniel Sobey
New photo by Daniel Sobey
Most of these are from the Australian subsidiary not the UK parent company.

Most just contain the logo but there are at least 2 in my list that do have the label name in words (see the first photo).

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Well. I have been voting quite a lot over these past years and usually am checking carefully when such edit series are at stake. In this case I did read the annotations (note that wcw1966 was very kind in not just replacing the 2011 annotation :wink: ) noticed particularly the “this may change in the future”, checked the Series page, which looked well furbished and quite complete (which meant that no information was really lost by these edits) and voted yes based on this and on the trend in several edit discussions over the last years, which seemed to have a majority of editors going towards a more close “as on cover” approach. I was also assuming that an editor having done good edits for this kind of music over quite some time and willing to invest his time into changing hundreds of releases (and doing btw some quite sensible work at track level as well) must have a good reason to proceed and should be encouraged…

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OK Had a couple of weeks to think about this and everyone to chip in their opinions and I am going to start changing them back.

The original instigator of the change didn’t contribute to this thread (I sent a message and there is no response (disappointing from an established editor) )

https://musicbrainz.org/edit/46682946
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/46682945