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Apparently this didn’t make it onto the list the first
time I sent it. Forgive, the book. I try not to post too much because it
ends up being a bit long, but as a lot of the transliterations recently
have been mine I think I should chime in. I think we need an AR to bind transliterations and
translations of the same album together currently so we can more easily combine
them when we have full solution for multiple languages. Transliterations and Translations (trans... albums) have
been cropping up a lot on the edits recently. And while many are mine
even more are from new moderators wanting to flesh out the database with useful
information. I’ve seen first hand by adding an official album and a
transliterated version that the transliterated version gets more attention and
editing; considering MB is an English site, go figure. And with a bit of
quick scanning through these edits you’ll see that there’s a bit of
confusion and debate as to how these should be handled. Partly because a
lot of the people voting and editing are new, but mostly because there’s
no documentation and almost no official way to tie these together. Examples. http://musicbrainz.org/album/08229f60-a117-4d7f-b3a7-03533267eeb2.html http://musicbrainz.org/album/1a18e14a-de59-415e-9abd-1e644cd58dc6.html The issue has already been brought up on the mailing list a
few times but nothing has ever come of it; so now that this is growing I think
we need to come up with a solution. The following threads are some of the
best discussions thus far about the issue but are 6-12 months out of date. http://lists.musicbrainz.org/pipermail/musicbrainz-style/2005-July/000254.html http://lists.musicbrainz.org/pipermail/musicbrainz-style/2005-July/000252.html http://lists.musicbrainz.org/pipermail/musicbrainz-users/2005-December/010426.html Long and short of it is that there are more and more
trans... albums going up, and under the current wiki rules for
VirtualDuplicateRelease they are to be kept in the database. This creates
a lot of duplicate albums that need to be tracked and edited because if they
are the same a change on one album should affect the others. Some
people’s answer to this is to eliminate trans... albums completely but I
don’t think they’ll go away considering that: 1. The wiki currently approves or it B. The database is already full of them Perhaps we can debate the issue of whether MB should have
trans... albums, but on another thread. This tread is about a solution to
bring a little more order to the database rather than throwing it into further
chaos. Alexander Dupuy came up with an excellent summary of the
issue and how to deal with it in on of the previous threads: > In general, I see the roadmap for this aspect of i18n
as follows > > 0. entry of transliterations - as Orion notes, there
are a lot of these > already for Asian artists, where they are the most
useful/needed, and they > will continue to be entered on an ongoing basis > > 1. addition of AR linktype for transliterations - the
issues with clusters > are tricky, but this seems the best way to go; some
design is needed to > coordinate with other "same as" type
relationships (e.g. re-release, > remaster, etc.) > > 2. elaboration of style guidelines for transliterations
- there are some > best practices, but it's true they haven't really been
well codified > > 3. enhancement of album display to "hide"
unwanted transliterations - this > is part of a much larger project, which would be the
follow-on to the > artist page redesign, adding special display support
for album-album AR > links > > I anticipate a lot of griping from people who find
transliterated entries > "unreadable and simply wrong" until the final
roll-out of step 3, but I'm > convinced that this is the right direction for us to
go. #3 is the best and final solution but will take time to get
something running; banning good information till then just creates a bigger
workload later when we have a solution and MB becomes a truly international
site. There’s no reason to throw away good info right now just
because we’re confused with what to do with it, or worse disagree with it
because it doesn’t make the database “pretty”. Remember
the goal is the ultimate repository of music releases, not the most uniform but
lacking site on the net. #2 is really an ongoing process as we refine a standard for
transliterations (which we desperately need). Getting started now is
great, but it’s more of an evolving side issue rather than a solution in
itself. We need guidelines for how trans... albums are represented if the
official label doesn’t provide them; considering we still debate the
language of foreign releases there’s obviously a lot of work to do but
that’s a different discussion and a different issue. #0 is happening no matter what and will continue to do so,
it’s not so much a solution to the problem as it is the problem
itself. Some people may disagree with trans... albums but it’s an
issue we’ll have to face eventually, the only question is do you want to
ignore it now and let the problem grow and piss people off in the
meantime? Or do you want to come up with a solution now and have
everything in place when MB will allow users to select a language and have all
text and info displayed in that language? #1 is the solution and what I’m proposing today.
By creating an AR for trans… albums we can clean up the database by
grouping albums together. This will make it easier to share modifications
across albums, it will make it easier for people to find the version of the
album they want, and it will make it easier to combine the albums together when
we have a solution like is given in #3. Whether you like translations or not I think everybody
agrees that it would be better for identical albums to be tied together and ARs
are the best way to this. Plus with everything tied together there will
be a lot more possibilities for our able-bodied programmers to solve some of
the issues above and other issues around duplicate albums. Such as having
all info other than the title and track names between trans... albums locked
together so that editing a release date in one album will auto correct the
releases date in it’s identical counterparts. As for the clustering problem, Don Redman mentioned a
possible solution of a script that would search the database, make the missing
recommendations to complete a cluster. However I think the problem of AR
clusters pales in comparison to the idea of multiple identical albums spread
across different artists in the database, none sharing any identical
information. http://lists.musicbrainz.org/pipermail/musicbrainz-style/2005-July/000255.html So what does everybody think? |
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