After many hours of confusion when adding Releases by relatively unknown regional artists and trying to figure out of the existing Artists of the same name is the same person, here is what I do.
- I now add a disambigutation string for every Artist I create. Usually it is region and occupation, e.g. “South African baritone”. Sometime it will be an “active” or “c.” decade or century, e.g. “active 2000s”, “c. 16th cent.”. The test is: if I see this Artist’s name and disambiguation string in a list from a name lookup in an Add Relationship dialogue, will it tell me that this is the correct entry?
- I now add Artists before adding a Release, so that I can pay more attention to fleshing out the Artist entry without the new Release hovering in the UI.
- I am not satisfied unless I can add at least a few External Links or Relationships to an Artist I create. Obvious facts to add are: link to official home page, link to a bio, link to Wikipedia or Wikidata, link to their social media accounts, relationship to a Group they belong to, etc. If I can find a bio or Wikipedia entry, I can often get year or date of birth, place of birth, current place of activity. The test is: if I want to make a Relationship to an Artist (e.g. for a Release entry), and I look at this Artist entry, can I be pretty certain whether this is the Artist I want to use?
- Sometimes I create an Artist entry for a group, so that I can designate my new Artist as being part of the group. Sometimes that leads to creating Artist entries for the other members of that Group. And the Group should have external links, Relationships, dates, and disambiguation string. It becomes a cascade of extra work.
- Annotations are my friend. I add annotations where facts or unclear or where the standard fields and relationships don’t tell the story. The annotation (not the disambiguation string) is also the place for notes to other editors about ambiguities or work to be done.
- When I add an Artist with a similar name to an existing Artist, and that existing Artist doesn’t have a disambiguation string, I add a disambiguation string to that other Artist. That requires looking at the other Artist, and whatever Releases or Relationships they are part of, to understand that story. Often I will add external links and relationships to that other Artist to bring the entry up to my standards.
As a rough guess, about 30% of the time I take to enter a new little-know regional classical music Release is taken up with entering the Artists required for that Release, and the cascade of other Artist edits that results from the new Artist.
My answer is that you should resist accepting Artists as being “unknown”. Take a look at the existing Artists which might apply before you enter their new Release. Make them known. Improve their Artist entry and disambiguation string before you start on the Release itself. If it’s really not clear whether or not the existing Artist applies to your new Release, then make a decision to either use the existing Artist or add a new one, but certainly add Annotation(s) to link the two Artists and the evidence that they might be the same and that they might be different.