Questions about Wikidata relationships

MusicBrainz
1

Should each alias of a person link to the artist’s Wikidata element, or should a Wikidata element correspond to only one MBID?

I’ve been linking Wikidata to aliases, since it seems that with most Wikidata elements there will be a one-to-many relationship—because artists with performance aliases get multiple MBIDs, and it won’t always be clear whether (or which) one of them is primary. But does a non-unique MBID–Wikidata relationship cause any problems for API users?

Also, if a work is a translation of another work, should the translation also get a link to the original work’s Wikidata element, or only a link to the localised Wikipedia article?

1 Like
2

You can link one person Wikidata to several artist MBID and you can link several artist MBID to one person Wikidata.
Aliases have no MBID, only artists have.

3

Personally, I merge many of the multiple-MB listings into one. That would certainly solve the question. There are a few entries where artists keep separate identities. But typically, what I run into are older entries from before MB expanded some of the naming features or the more obvious misspelling-type situations.

*I’ve even considered joining Discogs to join some of the multiple listings - and separate the wrongly joined ones.

1 Like