Work Types Proposal

Looks great, the tooltip is a very useful …eh… tool. Well done :wink:

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Sorry for the delays everybody, I got massively distracted…
The new Work types and the selection+tooltips are currently deployed on beta: Log In - MusicBrainz

Do let me know if you encounter any issues or have suggestions for improvement.

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Thanks, @mr_monkey, this looks fantastic! I’ll try to add a couple works, go through the motions and say if there’s something I think should be improved, but it really looks great to me.

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I’m really happy with how the new work types were implemented. The hierarchical display, the tooltip, the description once you’ve selected a type, being able to search the list… all great.

The only thing I didn’t like is the “Comics/manga/sequential art” type being displayed like that, with slashes. Would prefer just having a main title and the other variants showing in the tooltip. But this was the most disputed type, and at least “manga” needs to be searchable to prevent a mutiny, so I think this isn’t possible at the moment. But maybe in future work types can have searchable aliases, there can be other cases like this, where people are adamant about distinctions in a type.

Something else that would be nice would be to add the list of work types to the User Guide, so people can look through the whole list.

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The current help page for ‘Work’ seems to acknowledge that a ‘fix-up’ or ‘poetry cycle’ are valid types of works (and they can fully include such types of works as ‘short story’ or ‘poem’). And that’s the approach that seems to represent reality well. There are cycles of shorter works that are usually published or referred to as a whole, still the highlights inside the cycle can be reused as a standalone work, and oftentimes that won’t happen for each one, just those considered ‘best’. Cynically, then, there’s even no need to create a separate entry for each of the ‘filler’ ones, that never scored to be published alone.

Yet, when creating a new work, there’s no option to set its type as a ‘fix-up’ or ‘poetry cycle’ (neither i can find a way to add them as ‘new’ work types). How come? :frowning:

Both of these are in the “link to other works” section. They describe relationships between works, not work types.

For poetry cycles, I think we arrived at the conclusion the poem is the work. A poem cycle is just a series of poems.

“Fix-up” is the way a novel can be produced. E.g. novel X is a fix-up of short stories A, B and C. Both the novel and the individual short stories are works.

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