It's increasingly clear that the current practise for asian (mostly Japanese) artists is very confusing for new editors, and isn't documented anywhere in particular. I'd like to fix that (the documentation issue at least), but I quite a while ago gave up even trying to edit these entries, so I'd like to get some community input rather than rushing off to just write a page.
Please note, I don't really want to get into what we should be doing, that's a different discussion, and someone else is welcome to take it up and create a real guideline. I just want to document what we actually are and have been doing. I would also like to state I don't entirely agree with that practise, but not overly strongly. First question: What would such a page best be called on the wiki. I don't think this could be a real official guideline, and I'm not good at wiki page naming. As for content, briefly, the current practise is: 1: If the entry is nominally in English, but the artist is Japanese, set the release language to Japanese/Latin (so that people won't apply English style rules to it) 2: Copy exactly the track titles from the cover, if you can. 3: A move has been going on to add the artists to the JapaneseArtists wiki page, and then set release languages correctly (to English, where applicable.) So point 1 may not apply, but read the comments at the bottom of that page for more info. Rationale: Artist Intent applies here. These artists have a tendency to choose track titles and punctuation for aesthetic reasons, and tend to be very consistent about it once a track is titled. (Insert a couple of good examples, something from the Escaflowne soundtracks or Gits:SAC maybe, that have been edited a million times and are about as accurate as we'll ever manage) While western artists often use eccentric capitalisation and punctuation on a cover, tracks will revert to standard caps/punctuation in their discographies, and on reissues and compilations. These Japanese entries however, will often intentionally retain the eccentricities across multiple issues, on all entries on their website (and often label websites), and on compilation issues. By our own standards that is enough to apply artist intent, and western entries that do display that level of consistency also retain odd capitalisation and punctuation. (Insert example here, Front242 have a couple off the top of my head) This is obviously a rough first draft, and as soon as someone comes up with a suitable wiki name, better put there for editing. But comment away anyway (especially you, mo) -- Lauri Watts _______________________________________________ Musicbrainz-style mailing list Musicbrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style