Thanks! I don’t see any problem illustrated there, but a useful repository of localized names. Same as Wikidata has (see “All entered languages” in Tōru Takemitsu - Wikidata).
It’s where I took them from.
There are about 20 duplicate aliases, IMO.
I added them just to demonstrate how clumsy it is.
We should not have to add such an amount of duplicates. It will not be done by editors. It means that our MB artists will never have the appropriate alias for Latin languages other than English.
It further restricts the use of MB in other languages.*
It would be better to have a top level Latin alias, and if an exception is needed for this or that Latin language, like Vietnamese where they keep family name first, then you can set a specific.
* But OK, no big deal as I think they are not used so much.
I transcluded the changes since there seemed to be no huge opposition.
If we eventually decide to have a script default, then the instructions can be amended as needed, although that would require a complete rethink of how our locales work so I don’t expect it anytime soon.
I agree that script would be useful. Especially for the use case of getting the names in a script that the user can actually read. Picard can make use of aliases for this, but needs to do its own script guessing.
But as reo pointed out earlier, aliases are also language dependented. So we would need both, with the possibility to combine script and language. E.g. you would want to have Serbian with both latin script (“Toru Takemicu”) and cyrillic script (“Тору Такемицу”).
I just came across a brilliant example of how the changes in how we display primary aliases tend to nudge some editors in the wrong direction (i.e. the issue I was illustrating at the top of the thread): search query.
Until the time of the relevant MBS release, see how alias locales are used more or less correctly. From that moment onwards (moving towards the beginning of the query), nearly all aliases are added as primary.
I can totally see this happening, but the only solution I can find for it is educating the user. “This is the primary alias for this locale” should probably link to Style / Aliases - MusicBrainz - that might already help? I wrote the code for that for now.
Exactly, well said.
But we don’t have time to add 16 aliases.
Instead of adding language-less aliases, I might start adding French-only aliases, even if it would have been good for most other Latin based languages.
Nowadays, super-French-style transcriptions of Japanese artists don’t exist any more.
We unfortunately aussi use the Hepburn transcription, like in England, making many French people mispronounce the names.
But it’s like that, so having just one Latin alias is possible in many cases. And we can add a language-specific alias for the rare exceptions.
@reosarevok I didn’t know where to put this.
Currently, I guess we don’t display the primary alias if it is identical to the entity name.
But could we also not display it:
- When it’s identical, case insensitive
- When the primary alias is contained within the entity name*
- When the entity name is contained within the primary alias
* Example (it is displayed):
I was wondering where this came from recently…
For this particular example, isn’t this showing that the alias is wrong and should be corrected (probably by marking it as non-primary)? This is a song with an English title written by a US musician, and Wikipedia says that it’s called 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy), and that’s the name used by the work entity and by almost all of the recordings linked to it, so I’m not sure why it has a different primary English alias.
I have to check if it was me who entered that initially … but I have to admit I never really understood that locale stuff
Ha… found it … Edit #44183444 - MusicBrainz by Jesus2099
For me, I understood this showed the 2 possible titles for this song.
As, sometimes it’s just Sandy, sometimes it’s just Asbury Park.
These are titles which are typically found on bootlegs
I’ve created Edit #121434825 - MusicBrainz to unset “primary for locale”. I’m no expert, but it looks like the full title was used on the first release (see the back image here).