On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 09:20:53PM +0200, Stefan Kestenholz wrote: > Please answer me this: What is the legimation of a user translated > entries in the database, if it wasn't released in this form? I have seen > no objections against the ideas of creating translations in the database, > I think this should be adressed first. > > Given the recent decision to not allow "Top whatever" listing of tracks > into the database, because they are not legitimate, I can't help but > wonder what the difference is, that these kind of > translations/transliterations should be added as separate entries. I > gather it is an effort to make MusicBrainz more accessible from a > internationalisation point, but is this the way to go? Couldn't the > translations be added to the annotations, without creating entries that > are in fact as non-existent as the "top whatever" entries? > > The system thought up in the NextGenerationSchema would feature different > track titles attached to the *same* release entry in the database, which > will be a useful tool to provide track titles in the language the user > likes to see them. The creation of distinct entries (even if linked > using ARs) is not really the way to go, IMHO.
We already have thousands and thousands of transliterations and translations. Telling people that artist names shouldn't be converted to Latin has not stopped people entering edits to convert them back and telling people they can't add transliterations won't stop people trying to add them. Furthermore, adding separate entries has been the norm for quite some time now, even if they were to be forbidden, a lot of less devoted editors won't even realise that we've decided to ban them and add them anyway. Before there was an acceptable solution for using Latin artist names, many people were very angry about being forced to use scripts they couldn't read and I'm sure they would just leave MusicBrainz altogether if we refuse to allow them to have release and track titles they can use. Then there's problems like Kate Bush's "π" and Billy Joel's "Концерт". I hope that's enough said on those issues. I would say that the difference between "Top Whatever" lists and transliterations and translations is that transliterations and translations are *representations* of real releases whereas the "Top Whatever" lists have no official release with the tracks in that order. Another reason is that not everyone has Unicode support, and not everyone wants lots of unreadable filenames. Even Picard doesn't and can't support automatic transliteration of all scripts. If you'd like to attempt automatic transliteration of Japanese, please be my guest, it's too difficult for me. :) I personally hate that we have to have separate releases with separate IDs and so on, but it's really the only solution which keeps the people wanting to *use* this data happy. That's why I want to be able to link these together, so that once we're able to have more than one set of titles per release, we can either automatically merge appropriate releases or create reports for them. Lukáš has implemented permanent MBIDs, I believe, so once we have NGS, the IDs will just become links to the real entry. Plus, what's the point in deleting lots of data just so that people can add it again later? --Nikki _______________________________________________ Musicbrainz-style mailing list Musicbrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
