SensCritique and MusicBrainz

MusicBrainz
#1

Hi everyone,

I am French website SensCritique music admin.
As some of you know, SensCritique uses MB for its music section. As a consequence, many of our users use MB to improve both our databases.
Unfortunately, some also decided to ignore guidelines and use MB the wrong way in order to force the changes they want to see on SC (all of our other sections are open wikis). For a recent example: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/74755931

We want to make clear that we never encouraged such abuses and that we will never do. We built the SC music section based on MB and we clearly benefit from a clean database.
Unfortunately, as our user base is substantial (1.6M users) some members choose not to respect the rules of both SC and MB (@pankkake made a great effort in listing a lot of them).
It was the case with user Eric_Haynes who happened to be the latest account for a repeat offender used to abusive edits. This kind of behavior is obviously unacceptable and we banned the user and his hundreds of accounts from SensCritique, thanks to proofs provided by @chaban and @Fabe56.

As stated before, we want the relationship MB/SC to be mutually beneficial (as lot of SC users are contributing correctly and profusely to MB). I believe that this mutual trust was improved when I was made auto-editor by some of you and we want to keep it that way.
That’s why we will improve our vigilance towards abusive users and will apply a strict policy against destructive and wrong edits.

I will gladly be your contact point for any SC-related issues and user reports. You can also contact @sc-content. If you have any questions, we will answer them under this thread.

Thanks to all of you and we look forward to working with you all to improve our databases,
Cheers,
Raton

14 Likes
#2

Great, thank you @Mapache_Del_Raton !!
I am subscribed to some editors repeatedly adding digital media as CD, and I can usually guess why :stuck_out_tongue:
It’s great to know I can get someone to give them a nudge from the SC side if it becomes too much.

Just out of interest, may I ask why SensCritique requires a physical medium? (I don’t know if it does, I just always assumed that must be the reason)
Any other differences we should be aware of that might influence editor behaviour? e.g. setting release country to France instead of [worldwide] (might be an honest mistake unrelated to SC)

4 Likes
#3

@Mapache_Del_Raton thanks for this clarification, to be completely honest the situation was getting increasingly damaging, it’s nice to see that we’re going to be able to make things better :slight_smile:

SC takes data from all official supports, that’s why some added promo as official for example. CD or digital media should not change this!

1 Like
#4

Thanks for your replies @aerozol and @Fabe56 !
In fact, the release format is not the most important thing and we import CDs and vinyls as well as digital. The users who make this mistake are just confused I guess ?

To be more exhaustive, these are the criterion for the import script to work :

  • Only the first release that fits the criterion in the RG (we only take one release per group)
  • The release status has to be set to official
  • The primary type must be either album, EP or single
  • Some secondary types are excluded: audio drama, audiobook, interview, spokenword
  • A date must be set (there are some exceptions because of issues with our script though)
  • Country and label are facultative but of course we encourage our users to fill these fields
  • Only some release formats are taken into account: CDs, vinyls, digital medium and sometimes cassettes
    -> Among those formats some are excluded for now (CD-R, HDCDs or shellacs I believe)

If your french is good you can read our public guidelines here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bkighanKzonhcY5HEWcHL4xvqOuLDiH5DcH_cETfAJc/
We need to be more precise about cover art uploads by mentioning that the cover art must correspond to the release and not the general RG (I noticed that a lot of SC users were wrong in digipak covers).

I hope that I was clear enough and thanks again for your interest

2 Likes
#5

Why exclude HDCD?
It just plays as a regular CD in all CD decks.
It would be like excluding chrome cassette. :wink:

2 Likes
#6

Actually, it was a simple mistake at the first creation of the import script. HDCDs and CD-Rs will be included as soon as we update the script !

5 Likes