Debussy was the first subject of the classical “community clean-up”. Other specific composers were Mahler and Dvorak. That leaves quite a few. Interestingly, the clean-up did not specifically mention workname corrections in its objectives. Nevertheless, Debussy does look fairly tidy. There are some inconsistencies still (e.g. ‘Preludes Book’ vs ‘Preludes Livre’), not to mention some Japanese pictograms at the end of the list of works. Most of his works are commonly known by their French titles (an interesting exception is “Children’s Corner”) and so don’t present too many difficult choices - unlike other works discussed here where the commonly-used title is not the ‘original’ name.
That may be true, and it certainly is true that MB is far more than just a tagging source. Nevertheless, it is quite apparent that the focus of MB is on recorded music. For example, it is irritating when trying to review a composer’s works, to have all the recordings of those works listed, cluttering the page and often making huge gaps between works. Similarly, in the clean-ups mentioned above, the focus was on recordings, not works. And, as already discussed, the style guidelines for works (as opposed to track titles) are virtually non-existent (hence this thread).
I am very supportive of MB becoming a more authoritative encyclopedia. In particular, it would be nice to improve its reputation as a source for classical music data. I think this is quite a long-term project with a number of different strands. Work-naming is one of these strands, but separate and related strands must be the database structure and the UI. For example, when listing a composer’s works, aside from the ‘clutter’ problem, it is not possible to see a hierarchical view, or just to list ‘top’ works. As regards Picard, my experience with the Classical Extras plugin highlighted that accessing the MB database for works which are parts of other works is not really catered for in the webservice - each requires an additional lookup with a 1 second rate-limiting.
Apologies for broadening the topic out somewhat, but I think the broader context is relevant. Agreeing a style for work names and then implementing it is important but will take quite a lot of effort. I think it is doable: although I haven’t counted how many classical works there are in MB, implementation can be structured by composer and popularity. But to make it worth doing, there needs to be a belief that MB aims to be a better (and preferably pre-eminent) resource for classical music.