I thought you could rename an artist in Edit Artist, but this ended up changing all the existing Work artist credits to use the new name.
If you create a duplicate Artist with the new name, then merge the existing Artist into the new one, what happens to the credits? (I assume this is not recommended though because it needlessly changes the “primary” MBID.)
???
Rename are not supposed to do that, just make sure to not check the box for the “Update matching artist and relationship credits to use the new artist’s name”. We recently discuss about this here. And if you want to see the result:
The rename will change relationships that are credited to the artist without a specific credit entered, but won’t change relationships where the specific credit has been entered, even if it matches the artist name being changed. Unless I’m remembering wrong, that is!
So there’s no way to populate empty credits with the current name when renaming an artist? This seems like a bit of an oversight to me, because it sounds like the answer to my question is that there’s not a way to rename an artist without changing most/all of the existing credits.
Almost 100% exactly this discussion also happened recently in MBS-10056:
So vote for https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-8441? (And is https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-9390 a straight duplicate of that issue or not?)