I would like to recommend two missing relationships to be added on Musicbrainz. Hopefully I am not the only one who will think that these will be useful.
1: The first is to help document and expand upon artwork credits for releases. I think that since you already offer the possibility to put relationship credits for recording studios (through Area and Place), then a new “Place” selection could be created for “Designed at”, which could allow us to document graphic design studios where artworks are made. Right now we’re limited to only crediting the “Name” of the graphic designer, but many times personal names are not used when a firm is hired for the artwork.
2: The second is to help broaden the Person to Artist relationships links. Right now, on a Person profile, one can link a personal relationship, but this is limited to “Children”/“Parents” (Step), “Siblings” (Half, Step), “Married” and “Involved With”. Although these are great, I think they’re rather limited. This applies to me personally because one of my grandmother and several of my uncles and cousins have been involved in the music industry but I have no way to link a personal relationship with them. I think that at the very least, an “Extended Family” option should be added, to cover all of those other family members. Maybe also a (Grand) property can be added to the “Children”/“Parents” section to help with that relationship.
Looking forward to hearing people’s take on these suggestions! Happy holidays.
For #2
The way it was explained to me is -
if you have a musician, you can add one layer of non-musical family.
This becomes helpful when connecting other musical family members.
As example, you (a musician) can add your father (non-musician), to be able to connect to your grandfather (musician).
For me, personally, I am hesitant to add non-musical family, unless specifically to connect someone (and sometimes, I have added the one non-musical child because I added 5 musical children and didn’t want the 6th to be left out of the family tree). It is a privacy issue for me. I signed up to have my information broadcast. Others enjoy (and deserve) their privacy.
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As to any suggestions for addition “family” relationships: Cousin is too generic. I would not support it. And it would open us up to all kinds of abuse.
I would accept Grand.
I would accept In-law.
I would like to see some options added to the ending of relationships, such as a marriage ending in death or divorce.
I think in regards to Musicbrainz’s true purpose, the goal would be to link to family members who are also in the music industry; not create empty Person entries with a single relationship to someone else who is involved in the music industry. To me that’s pointless. My grandmother or my uncles, as an example, were active in the music industry, and could be linked to me, as I am also a musician. I wouldn’t create a Person entry for my father because he wasn’t active in the music industry. The goal of Musicbrainz is to create linked relationships to other musicians, not have a family tree. If a person is not a musician but has a role on an album, such as artwork or executive, then I understand that it can be justified. However, I don’t believe that Micheal Jackson’s great-great-grandparents, who possibly had nothing whatsoever to do with the music industry, should have Person profiles created just for the sake of not leaving “someone” out. That’s ridiculous.
In these cases I use a group artist entity for this firm and I think it is perfectly correct and sufficient.
It seems that your screenshots are not well integrated in your posts.
Do you know that you can directly paste the screenshot from your computer clipboard into the post editor? This way they do appear very nicely.
Thanks a lot for that suggestion jesus2099. No offense but the point of this thread is to hopefully get these features integrated, not find temporary work-arounds. I think that this thread would benefit much more from people voting yes or no for features, that way the moderators can see if it’s worth implementing or not, if there’s enough interest. I’m really not trying to be a jerk by saying that, I really just want this thread to stay on focus and not get side-tracked with Musicbrainz hacks.
But I do think using group is better than having a new relationship.
But I’m not representative of any majority, indeed, let’s wait for other.
Just want to tell I’m not suggesting a work‐around, but the right solution for me.
If you want votes it may be an idea to setup a poll. And fix the non-displaying screenshots.
Extending on @jesus2099 comment - if you are on Windows the Snipping Tool is idea for screen shots that can be directly pasted into the forum.
Your idea seems sensible though. For ideas on extending how relationships it would make sense to go mine the methods from Family Tree software. Look at their relationship links as they will have work through a lot of the oddities. We have musical people here so I bet there are plenty of “unusual” connections that will need to be covered.
For item #1 I’m with Jesus - for the use case “the credit is for a studio/firm”, a group artist is perfectly fine.
I’m not generally opposed to having more thing-place relationships, but for cases like this, I fear it would lead to design firms being added bith as groups and places for no actual benefit (and without evidence - even if Foo, Inc is hired and credited, one of their employees could have done all the work from home).
Item #2, I have no issue with extending familial links for artist/artist, although probably only along direct lines (plus maybe aunt/uncle, but certainly not cousin). But for person/artist (not that there is currently a distinction), one level seems enough.
Given there is no separate Person entity, I fear that extending it would be more likely to lead to misuse than good uses. Extra family information can always be put in the annotation pending the ability to create relationships for it.
As an aside: I’m not overly fond of the use of the annotation for https://musicbrainz.org/artist/33b2f457-8d75-40a2-a500-1125cbc5e1b9 - it repeats information already added as relationships. That is redundant. Given that it’s only in English, ideally you’d keep that only for information that cannot be stored elsewhere. The current content looks like it could/should be set up as a Wikipedia page (which mb would happily show, including using a translated page based on the user’s language settings, I believe).
When I was new and was asking questions, I was told that annotation could be used for wikipedia-type biographies.
I haven’t used it that way (yet), because people I edit either have biographies somewhere (biography link), or they have so little information available that I couldn’t write one. I have only used it to leave little edit notes for future identification (not to be confused with, related to, could be same as). But at least we know why I may have used it that way, if I had - I was told I could.
Don’t get me wrong - it’s not an incorrect use.
I just don’t like a) the repetition of info, and b) the fact that it’s not localizable. But that’s just me.
It also seems sizable enough for a WP article (and it looks like there’s plenty of links, so notability does not seem to be an issue).
Unfortunately, since Wikipedia has strict rules about Conflict of Interest (that is, people creating or editing Wikipedia articles about themselves, family members, or organizations they work for) I wouldn’t be able to make a Wikipedia article about myself. They love blocking people’s IP permanantly for things like that. But anyone here willing to create one on my behalf has my blessings.
For me as well. It is not just you.