I sympathise with the impulse to make a disambiguation string required for all new Artist entries. My own policy is always to enter a disambiguation string when I add an Artist entry.
However, my argument against making just this be the policy is that it is a puny and insufficient response to a much deeper problem. The deeper problem is a combination of:
- Editors create Artist entries with insufficient research and detail
- The ambiguity does not exist when the first Artist with a common name is entered; it begins when the second Artist with a similar name is entered. The Editor entering the first Artist does not know that disambiguation will be required later.
- The MusicBrainz web app UI does not display enough of the Artist information in search result lists to effectively distinguish between potential Artist matches; it shows Name and Disambiguation but not any other Artist data
- Adding an Artist entry with good research and detail is made more difficult by clumsiness of the MusicBrainz web app UI — I have detailed comments on the Create Artist page design
- If we require disambiguation strings, we need to have style guidelines for what to put in them, and what abbreviations to use. My own template is “
<area> <role> <time>”, e.g. “Canadian trumpeter and composer, fl early 21c.” This at the very least distinguishes that Artist from the 1950’s UK recording engineer of the same name.
You have put your finger on a difficult tradeoff. Higher quality data vs lower effort to add. In my opinion, we should be talking about this tradeoff in the context of Artist data quality and overally MusicBrainz editor interaction. Framing it as just a question of disambiguation strings is too limited.