I also notice there are two New Germany credits as options. I know there are cities by that name, but I don’t believe it was ever used as a name of a country.
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I’m right this moment in the process of adding a whole lot more options to the area search, which is why you are seeing the two cities New Germany. Once I finish the update (should be another 1015 minutes or so) there will be a clarification to the side of it, as can currently be seen on test.bookbrainz.org:
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That explains why I haven’t seen it before. I thought it was a case of selective disinterest on my part.
Is that a guesstimate or should I set my alarm clock?
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Update is all done now!
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Thx, works well for a lot of places, but not all are listed (e.g. The German city Uerdingen)
And there is a problem with the listing —>
many duplicates of the same city, or if there are more than one cities with the same name in Wisconsin and Minnesota you can’t tell them apart.
Am I to gather that the city of the person’s birth is displayed without the country?
I have a fairly good geographical knowledge, but I have never heard of Richfield in any capacity.
Is there more of this update to come?
Indeed there are:
I opted to limit the amount of information in the small text next to the name, so their respective counties are not shown (we currently only show larger subdivisions and country, but not smaller subdivisions like county, municipality, district, etc.)
I hadn’t encountered the need for it, but now that you’ve found one I’ll amend the code.
I also see MusicBrainz does it better:
Yes indeed. This was only the search side of things, and there are more improvements needed everywhere we show a geographical area.
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I’m glad to hear that, otherwise I will be spending a lot of my time thinking WTF is that!
We are using a copy of the MusicBrainz database, and I suppose nobody previously had the need to enter an artist from Uerdingen on MusicBrainz.
I’ll copy here the help text about adding new areas:
To request that an area be added to Musicbrainz submit a bug request under the AREQ category. See the AREQ issues for more information.
I would then need to update the copy (in the future this step won’t be necessary as we will directly access the MusicBrainz database instead of maintaining a copy of the areas in BookBrainz)
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I have just tried several towns in my vicinity and it seems Australia is under-represented.
Thanks for your efforts by the way @mr_monkey. It might not sound that way!
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Constructive criticism is always welcome!
I do appreciate all of you helping me test new changes and report old issues, it’s very very helpful !
I know my work is sisyphean, but as long as we are heading in the right direction and making progress, all is well.
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Just make sure to side-step the boulder on the way down!
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By the way, you’ve done something to / with the search engine. It’s much better now. Thx…
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Ah, good to know the results are so obvious!
Yes, the main body of this project was to improve the search results overall, and showing areas was just a subset of that task.
Previously the search engine was returning wild results that didn’t seem related to the search query at all (I had to dig deep to understand the reasons why and improve the configuration accordingly).
If you see any issues with the search —or results that look like they don’t fit— please do let me know.
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I suggest New York be changed to New York City, because I have struck biographies that just record the state as a location. There could be some confusion otherwise.
There are some big places that don’t show up in the search for me, like Salem, MA, USA and Cambridge, UK.
Edit: Regardless, thank you for the new feature. I think it is good to know precisely where authors lived.
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Thanks that helps!
It uncovers another issue: it looks like the search endpoints currently only return a maximum of 10 results.
Salem, MA is indeed in the database, but does not appear in the search results because of that limit.
One more ticket ! https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/BB-577