A recognisable example of clutter artist profiles getting heaped up here.
Since the linked setlist.fm url of Big 'N leads to a blank/pointless profile over there it seems best to remove this profile altogether rather than merging it.
The dup is not surprising. One of the troubles of “big list” adders like this is they are clearly not caring about quality for MB. So they won’t spend any time with the search. As “Big’n” will not be found in a search for “Big 'N” because of the space then they are not going to spend time checking.
It is also clear they don’t seem to know much about the band either if they didn’t think to try without the space.
It seems strange to me to allow someone to use an “Event” to list the gigs they have seen. And other editors should not be expected to clean up after these people. I would just delete the “event” as it is bogus
I suspect it isn’t a duplicate. f6f581c3-276b-4ad8-84f4-71aafb651d77 is a Chicago rock band that reportedly disbanded in 1997.
The Marcor site (and the setlist.fm) site appear to be for concerts in Europe in this century. I’d wager it’s some European artist I’ve never heard of.
None of this, however, is an argument for keeping that worthless entry (038e6542-0cfe-45a4-87a9-8e13f297e470) in Musicbrainz.
Okay, I take it back. Apparently the Chicago band re-formed around 2010, and then started doing European shows.
With minimal knowledge of French (and 3 years of HS Spanish), I was able to decipher some details from this French article:
Yeah, based off the Magasin 4 show photos I found it looked like the Chicago band 
I’m just going to go ahead and merge this example, because I’m impatient! This thread/setlist.fm discussion will live on fine without the dupe.
I don’t see the harm in merging as usual?
But the merge is open for voting here if anyone thinks it’s a bad idea.
Maybe I should have just asked to have the title of this topic changed, but instead, I created a separate topic specifically about the abovementioned bogus events (or bogus events in general)
No real harm, but merging will cause the destination artist to inherit the pointless/blank setlist.fm profile of the dupe artist, that’s all.
Well, I kind of hoped that the good people of MB would realize that I was talking about more than just one artist. But in case they didn’t -
Big N is how I found the issue. The point of the forum post was:
I wanted to know if we should be deleting a large portion of the 15,000 artists the user created.
And if yes, is it something we need to do manually, or can admin just ‘zap’ them.
Improper events. Artists who have just an event listing, or the previously mentioned setlist.fm.
With almost no real way to find out anything more about any of these unknown local artists.
It’s a big job if we decide to look and remove them all.
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Certainly not every artist he created should be removed - he also added a number of artists with more care, but his 42 events could be looked at & deleted (if agreed upon, some of them are more ‘real’ than others), leaving a considerable number of artists orphaned of any other relations, auto-deleting them shortly after?
I only opened a handful. But they were all that same style - artist, event, setlistfm.
But, we have to go through them all to see which ones may be at least salvageable.
If they have a setlist.fm link, they would not be orphaned.
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Indeed. Many have a setlist link, but also many don’t (half of them, maybe?)
So it would at least get rid of those automatically.
I think it’s quite clear to anyone who reads the thread. However, I wonder how many people skipped the thread because they only looked at the title, and figured they wouldn’t be interested because it’s about a musician they’ve never heard of, or because they’re not interested in a “help me clean up this one artist” thread.
Re. the events, they’re bogus data, so I would remove them.
And then let the artists that stay, stay, and vice versa. I wouldn’t over think it. It looks like the artists themselves do exist/have played so they are legit data. Those that are removed it’s also no huge loss.
If someone has a year of free time the perfect solution is to fill out the artist pages, even add all the proper events, but most likely… delete 
dirkvandamme suggested in one of his edit notes that part of the motivation for putting in these weird events with the links to webpages is that they provide a starting point for future research into the musicians in question.
While I (like most of us in this thread) don’t agree with his methods, I think, if we are going to keep the artists and delete the events, it would be good to convert the URLs from the event listing into something attached to the artists–something like “information about concerts found at http ://humo.be/{whatever}”–maybe in an edit-note, or an annotation, or something like that.
These URLs are not real.
Hm… okay, bad example on my part. A better example would be event/006e705c-eba2-401c-ae5b-4b4fd82fba49
The event is bogus, but the attached URL is real, and (somewhat) informative about the artists listed in the “event”.
I think that’s a fair consideration, but this exact info is also available (for future researchers & what not) at setlist.fm itself. For instance:
Jonge Helden is one of those artists created here because they are among the artists listed on one of the bogus events as discussed. The artist entry here resulted in this setlist.fm entry (setlist.fm/setlist/jonge-helden/1988/zaal-bret-genk-belgium-238710ab.html) which allows, if you click Show edits and comments on that page, to view where the info for the concert entry is sourced - i.e. exactly what we have here.
So the question is: how important is it (for research or other purposes) to keep Jonge Helden here at MB also? If it were to be deleted and a future researcher would find it a relevant artist; there’s nothing stopping him/her to add a “Jonge Helden” artist again, this time setlist.fm linked + with more meaningful data (hopefully) added.
Because of the occasional sloppyness (typos at concert listing source or too hasty concluded countries of origin for the artist) it can get pretty hard to make a 100% solid case to (if applicable) merge the typo/wrong country-artist with their more-than-likely valid artist entry. If it’s decided they shouldn’t be removed, ideally these artists would too get some sort of “stub” status (i.e. similar to the suggestion of an annotation for the bogus events)
And then there’s also a number of added artists with bogus urls like this one which was created over a year and a half ago but didn’t end up as a setlist.fm entry at all for whatever reason: Possibly too insignificant for a setlist.fm entry after all? Or maybe a typo which wasn’t clear when adding the typo-artist here, but became apparent when adding the setlist entry, leaving the typo-artist here unused? Who knows.
I know this may contradict my previous thoughts, but:
Would it be better (at least in the short term) to keep the bogus event(s) if we intend on keeping an artist without any other data?
My thinking for that is - most of (from what I saw) the setlist.fm pages are blank, the artists are blank without the event or setlist link.
So, if the artist is blank and setlist link is blank, without the bogus event, how would we even attempt to identify the artist? At least with the bogus event, someone may be able to find information somehow.
Of course, I’d rather see the event and setlist.fm deleted, which would delete the artist. But simply deleting the event while virtually no other information is available - seems counter productive. Someone will still come along and add a second ‘Artist X’ because the current ‘Artist X’ doesn’t have enough data to prove it to be the same.
The info (such as it is) added to Musicbrainz isn’t always available on setlist.fm (I don’t think – I don’t have a setlist.fm account, so I only see what’s available to anonymous users, e.g. no “Show edits and comments” button) For another instance, look at Karma Death. As near as I can tell, nobody has gotten around to putting any event info in setlist.fm for that artist.
Yeah, not very. I definitely won’t vote against any move to delete any of these “created-for-setlists.fm” artists.
If we do keep them, though, I think it would be useful to try and preserve what little useful information that was entered.
To that end, if/when I delete the bogus events (and if nobody else gets to them first), and if I can do it without a lot of extra work, I’m planning on copying the URL from the deleted event to the associated artists, probably by adding and edit-note to the artist.
It sounds like you’re thinking the same way I am – that these bogus event entries contain some small shred of real information, and if we keep the artist, it would be good to keep the information.
Any objections/improvements to my idea of simply moving that information (which in most cases is just the external link) out of the event listing and into an edit note for the artists and then deleting the event?
Would an annotation be better?
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Imo you are going above and beyond if you’re putting the time in to add stuff to these artists - go for it!
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