Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
Hi!
voiceinsideyou asked for input on
http://musicbrainz.org/show/edit/?editid=7696392, but I want to raise
the issue to this list.
The issue in short: the collaboration style guide requires and "Artist
A, Artist B & Artist C" format which is very unnatural for Han scripts
(Chinese+Japanese). We can either make all Chinese and Japanese
collaboration artists really ugly or we can have inconsistent data. I
don't have an example at hand, but the inconsistency might be
"堀江由衣、倉田雅世、雪乃五月" and "堀江由衣, 倉田雅世, & Latin Script Artist" on the same
release.
To reiterate what I said in my edit note, I've seen the following
formats actually used for Chinese artists: "歌手甲/歌手乙/歌手丙" (full or
halfwidth slash) and "歌手甲 歌手乙 歌手丙" (full or halfwidth space). For two
artists I have seen "歌手甲 & 歌手乙" which is why this is only an issue for
3+ artist collaborations.
I beleive that MusicBrainz defaults to forcing everything into a mold
that was made to fit latin scripts and that we need to review this
particular guideline (http://musicbrainz.org/doc/SortNameStyle). We
don't have many Chinese users and we would get even further away from
the possibility of having any by enforcing the guidelines as they are.
The fragmentation alluded to by Arturus is part of the reason I think
they probably should be standardised in some way.
I also question the assertion made by rowaasr13 and Philip (foolip) that
the "A, B & C" format is "unnatural" for Han script (and probably
others). I don't quite see how a funky fully spaced reverse comma thingy
"、" is much different (or more natural) than a latin comma when all
we're taking about is a special collaboration artist that often only
exists because of weaknesses in the schema (as alluded to by Brian), and
additionally when using the latin "&" (which isn't Han, kanji, kana etc
either) is quite common in the use of these languages?
With regards to the "styles I've seen in chinese artists", I've seen all
of those same styles in Western releases as well, and we still have
managed a style guideline there; it possibly just represents the
relatively immaturity of the Chinese and Japanese data in the database,
and the newness of its editors (on average) rather than on a real
preference or "more natural" representation.
I don't really have a /strong/ opinion on this, but my gut feel is that
it's not that big a stretch from what's "natural", and having a common
style will make it easier to find and split these artists when the
schema (one day in the distant future) can represent these multiple
track/release artists. Alternatively, I wouldn't have a problem either
with an alternative style guideline for these scripts that said to use /
separate artists either. As long as there is /some/ consistency, and the
issues with the "倉田雅世 & Chad" (or "倉田雅世 / Chad") type artists
are considered.
Chad / voiceinsideyou
PS: For what it's worth, a straw poll of the Chinese Singaporean people
sitting around me at work expressed no real preference or problem with
the naturality of it. But that's not scientific, obviously :D
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