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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