I’ve just begun editing on MusicBrainz, and I’m trying to do things properly, but I’m not always sure how to (the mass of information to ingest about MB and its practices is considerable when you start). I have a relational mind and I love being able to rely on relationships to record the proper information (and my OCD self suffers from the partial redundancy between performer relationships and recording artists). Therefore, I pay attention to linking recordings to the proper works. However, pretty often those works come with a lot of relationships themselves, and they appear on the recording or release credits, hurting their lisibility, hiding the relevant information and sometimes making the release presentation inherit from edit mistakes coming from other releases.
For instance, on the release I’m currently working on, the fact that the Habanera air from Carmen appears in the track list makes various Habanera pastiche arrangements appear in the release page (as later arrangements of the original). The more famous works you reference, the more serious the issue gets.
Is there a way to avoid that, to better manage the relationships with works, or to limit the relational information displayed about the works of a release?
I agree too, and hope that the quoted tickets are taken into account in the new UI. The default should be to only show relationships “up” the hierarchy from the related work. It’s irrelevant for the current release that someone arranged it or whatever for some other release.
Looks pretty good. I would suggest changing the recording artist from the composer to the performers. Note that this is not the same as the track artist, which is correctly set as composer. One of the irritations with the rather anachronistic handling of classical music by MB is that this inconsistency exists and has to be manually fixed. The quickest way to do it is to use loujine’s script: https://github.com/loujine/musicbrainz-scripts - you need the one entitled “Replace associated recording artist from a Release page”. You need to install Tampermonkey or equivalent in your browser first. Then click “show checkboxes”, “select all” and “replace selected artists” in that order.
See The Classical Editor Toolbox for plenty of useful tips.
I have a remark about not displaying all arrangements/medleys of a work: In the relationship editor, it can be quite useful to have all the arrangements or medleys of a work if you are looking for a work and only find its arrangement: it allows to find the original work much faster (same if you are looking for a specific version/arrangement of a work).
Obviously, the graph of the various works is absolutely useful and necessary. The only point I find unpleasant is that too much of it is displayed on a given release page.
I know about that, but I do like my credits inline, I’m just not interested in random mashups and arrangements that have nothing to do with the release I’m looking at.