It’s probably me, but I’m still very confused about the basics here.
MusicBrainz has an instrument list.
It currently has an entry called ‘drum’.
For whatever reason, there are at least two serious and unexplained problems with it.
‘drum’ is singular, but the explanation behind it is confusing, mentioning ‘generic drums’, variously sized druⅿs, etc.
for whatever reason, the first three letters of drum have a different font (or fontsize) then the last letter.
And now, without explaining what instruments, or in what situations MusicBrainz thinks ‘drum’ would pertain to, the question is raised: “how should we call it”?.
Call what?
It is not even clear what MusicBrainz thinks ‘drum’ should/could be.
Cut to the chase:
Under what circumstances would you want an editor to select ‘drum’ exactly?
I take it we are trying to come up with a generally common cataphoric word and drum(s) is pretty well understood and would fit the needs of most everyday users. Then we could each be as specific as we like or have knowledge as to its specific type. I would like to see a drop down box with many percussion instruments (not piano) for users to then pick from and add to. But that’s just me.
I am not a native English speaker, and must admit that I fail in in understanding what ‘cataphoric’ means here.
But I have some idea about how English handles singular vs. plural.
You saying that “drum(s) is pretty well understood” confuses me in this regard.
(This is getting a messy reply that doesn’t really need to be here, but I can see @jesus2099 are getting very confused with my words)
No I didn’t. You’ve almost read that part backwards. That was trying to check that the renaming bot would be kept tamed. I don’t like bots which don’t have humans checking them. They go wrong when handed simple rules. Membranophone being an example.
When mention of a Bot renaming all “drum” to “drum (generic)” I suggested to make sure it doesn’t rename all of them. Only if a bot was renaming a “drum” to “drum (generic)” would that “if type = engineer programming” statement be relevant. That was my badly worded attempt to say "don’t call every drum a drum (generic) because the word drum is used in many places.
I was trying to just point at changing “engineer programming drum” to “engineer programming drum (generic)” would look odd.
The post was about making exceptions to STOP autobot renaming mistakes. Exactly what you are also saying. You would probably know of other rules you would want to add to an automatic renaming bot.
“Drums” (being generic drums) was changed to “membranophone” as a deliberate and preannounced action by a human. No bot was involved.
This will not be done by a bot either, but by a human renaming the instrument entity, just like when you rename an artist, a release, a recording, etc.
There is no “automatic renaming bot.” The only bot action that has been talked about is moving relationship pointers from one instrument to another.
If something actually has been decided on and was changed, wouldn’t that have been communicated here by the people responsible?
That’s what I would expect after asking for feedback from users?
I would have liked to have seen “drum (generic)” or “drum (choose type)” with a drop down box to allow the user to choose one of a few common types and the ability to add other types if they so wished.
For a lot of users I would suspect they would be happy seeing either of the above headings instead of “unspecified drum”. If they are entering a CD, leaving “unspecified drum” without specifying would make them look lazy for not spending extra time finding out exactly what kind of drum was used.
Usually, in my case when entering a CD it is not a case that I am being “lazy” in not knowing what type of “drums” or “drum” are in use, but we don’t all have the musical knowledge to know the exact differences.
Having a credit for a drum or drums as per the booklet notes is better than having nothing at all.
Yes, because in this case you should be using “membranophone”, or a more specific subtype of it.
“Unspecified drum” means “it says drum or drums, and I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a drum set or what”. If you know what it is, then you should select the most appropriate instrument we have.
Nothing was hijacked. “Unspecified drum” IS a new item, the old item (which was originally “drums”) is still “membranophone”. Before implying we’re doing something stupid, it would be nice to make a few checks to make sure we actually are doing what you think
I suspect some people do wish they hadn’t touched stuff just because people are being weirdly unreasonable about it, yes. But since it was originally absolutely incorrect, and now it has a chance to be just half-wrong, I still think it’s a big improvement, personally.
Except it was broken, and had been broken for about 10 years, and we’re supposed to pride ourselves in good data, not laziness and not giving a shit, don’t we
I don’t understand how “unspecified drum” can be a new entity. Here’s the edit where I changed “membranophone” to “drum” on the recording in question (last August).
Since we don’t have an instrument entity for “tambora”, I used the most specific one I could find and added detail in the credited-as. “Drum” seems more appropriate to me than “membranophone” in pretty much every situation. Maybe there is a subcategory of drum in which the tambora falls, but if so I don’t know what it would be.
@reosarevok this is the bit that has confused me. Especially when the list of drums is looked at as a whole. I only ever see the database from the front - from looking at releases. And it is weird to see examples like the above drum change to something confusing.
I must say I liked it better as just “drum” with a description of “generic drums”. This would fit better all cases like the one discussed above where we have some description of the drum being used but have no other entry fitting. It also works in the cases where no details are given, “played unspecified drum” reads weird, “played drum” is fine And if editors are unsure and select “drum” instead of a more specific variant it is still not wrong, just not as accurate as it could be. And it can be improved later on by somebody with more knowledge about drums.
It’s a new entity in the sense that it’s not the old “drums” we originally changed. Yes, it’s a rename of the “drum” instrument that was created. But that “drum” instrument was meant to be used from the start as “it says drum(s), but I don’t know what to select”, it was just we thought putting that on the disambiguation would be enough. It wasn’t, and people kept using it for drum set credits, so we needed to make it even more clear that’s not the point.
The whole idea was to have two correct options: “membranophone” and “drums (drum set)”. The first for a general “this is a drum of a type we don’t have or the type is not specified”, the second for a specific rock/jazz/whatever drum set. “drum” might be a better name than “membranophone” in an ideal world - sadly we don’t live in an ideal world, and if we use “drum” Anglophone people will fill it with their drum set credits again, even if we specifically say in the annotation not to do it (we tried!).
“unspecified drum” is supposed to be used when you just don’t know what’s the right instrument. In that way, it’s the same kind of instrument as our bass: “it might be a double bass or an electric bass guitar or something else, but with the printed info there’s no way of knowing and there’s no clear option either given the music that’s being played”. This “bass” instrument is not really needed for rock music (where it’ll be electric bass guitar 99% of the time) nor for classical music (double bass 99% of the time), but for example in jazz a “bass” credit could be either. In the same way, there are some cases where “drums” could be either, and there’s no good way of knowing - those are the only times this instrument should be used.
I’ve amended the description of unspecified drum to be more clear.
I liked that more too - problem is that didn’t stop people from still using it when the credit clearly meant drumset
IMO this is part of the problem; “membranophone” should never be the correct option, because it’s a technical term that’s unknown to the vast majority.
But “bass” looks reasonable as a displayed value, where “unspecified bass” (or “low octave chordophone” for that matter ) would not.
From what I can see this does not seem to be that big of an issue. There’s something like 700 total recordings with “unspecified drum” credits, of which 25% or so are obviously correct just based on the credited-as column. Is there a lot of work going on that I’m just not aware of to keep that in check?
You’ve almost read that part backwards. That was trying to check that the renaming bot would be kept tamed. I don’t like bots which don’t have humans checking them. They go wrong when handed simple rules. Membranophone being an example.
) would not.