reosarevok:
Oh, one thing. If you add all the details to a release, please also set it as high quality!
I’ve wondered about this, and searched a bit, but could not find the relevant documentation or discussion.
Are there criteria to mark a release as high quality? Who should do it, and when? After I’ve filled all the data I could find about a release (all the data from the credits and booklets, plus data found on the Internet), and I’m confident everything is as good as it should, and all edits have been accepted, can I just go ahead and edit the quality? Should someone else not involved in that work come and judge the result?
You can just do it. I think it’s not an auto-edit unless you’re an autoeditor, but in any case, if you want to increase the chances of someone else seeing it and saying yes or no, you can make sure you set that edit as voteable with the checkbox
I think we should put a lot more emphasis on rating and displaying data quality. Maybe an additional top category “very high quality” (or whatever) would be good, which means that really everything is there one could dream of (complete high quality cover art, discid, etc.)
I like the way discogs indicates the state of a release by a vertical colored stripe left of the release title. We could go with gold (very high) - silver (high) - brown (normal) - red (low) for example. That could motivate people to bring the releases in their personal collection up in quality, simply because it is a visual satisfaction to see all the nice colors there. A bit of gamification, but with an emphasis on quality (not quantity)!
I think we also need to make data quality changes actually get votes somehow. I have started marking releases I edit as high-quality after finishing with them… and so far I’ve gotten a grand total of 0 votes, including (unfortunately) none against one where I mistakenly hadn’t entered all the info (now fixed).
So we need more people watching the open release quality edits … but really I think we need to do a better job of pointing out “interesting” edits to people. Normally when I look at the edits for e.g., my collections, it’s piles of scripted edits (e.g., set recording artist from ARs) that are a waste of time to review.
I usually don’t vote on quality edits, since there’s no way for me to verify that all knowable information has been added. (Unless cover art is added, and at that point, it’s most likely too much trouble double checking everything rather than just trusting the editor of the quality edit is right (and thus not voting against).)
I’ve always treated ‘high quality’ as an editor actually checking the data themselves/actually having the release.
If it’s just about filling in info, couldn’t that be automated anyway?
The main reason to have a vote on “change to high quality” edits is because some people (especially artists) will enter a change to high quality to indicate that the music is very good.
If cover art isn’t present, I don’t think that’s high data quality—seems like you should vote against it. Certainly can understand abstaining though, it is a lot of work to check everything.
But those edits I put in, AFAIK, weren’t even viewed. They didn’t pick up abstains either.
The confusion is understandable since the link is called “Change release quality”. Why yes, my music is most definitely a high-quality release! Probably changing that link to something like “Set data quality” would help.
I frequently don’t vote on edits at all, rather than abstaining on them (for a variety of reasons). That said, far, far most edits in MusicBrainz get applied without anyone ever seeing them. Quality changes are pretty far down in my own list of “important edits to review”. Changing the quality either direction does not cause any actual data loss or gain, but are merely an aid to others looking at the data. I could imagine myself simply skipping such edits entirely even rather than abstaining on them, esp. if they don’t look completely off at a glance. (As I said before, «I usually don’t vote on quality edits»; “abstain” is also a vote.)
