[mb-style] ClassicalReleaseArtistStyle - seems to have passed!

[Ryan McCabe]

On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 08:42:10PM -0400, Dave Smey wrote:
[snip]
> Well, to be clear (and like I said in the edit dialog) the
> ClassicalStyleGuide has *never* allowed Classical releases to be filed
> under performers - it says that the artist should be the composer.  The
> new guideline creates a limited exception to this and also explicitly says
> that it is not making a wider exception.
>
> If anyone wants to participate in the list and argue for a wider exception
> (and thus an even newer rule) they are free to do it!  But there is
> currently no reason to roll back what we just did.
[snip snipe]

Well, about 6 or 7 other autoeditors disagree with it, also. And it's not
about disrespect, either: it's about getting things right. It's not
personal at all. In my estimation, the only reason this passed is because
nobody who would have objected saw it in time. Let's face it: because
there are so many different avenues of communication the project has,
nobody can reasonably stay on top of all of them all the time. Just
because something went 48 hours without anybody hollering on one of the
(how many?) mailing lists doesn't necessarily mean you have a consensus
on the subject. When you start making edits and encounter a lot of pushback
on an issue, you ought to reconsider whether it actually makes sense.

In the particular edit in question, everyone who has participated has
either a) voted no, b) been ambivalent, or c) abstained, but only
because of the new guidline, in the absense of which they'd have voted
no. So does it make sense here? Apparently not enough to elicit more
than "well I can see merit in doing it both ways" sort of sentiment.
On the Kronos edits, I've seen a lot of clear disagreement with your
point of view, but no clear agreement with it.

I asked for opinions on IRC. I didn't "drup up support" for no votes. I
didn't even use the word 'vote'. I asked there because 1) people who have
been putting a lot of work into the project (i.e., people with a lot of
experience and good insight into issues here) -- and for a long time --
frequent the channel, and 2) it's common to get a bunch of feedback quickly.

Also note that guidlines are only guidelines -- not rules -- and that's
the way it's always been. In the context of style guidelines, something
like "such and such guidelines have never allowed for such and such," is
an inherently false proposition for this reason.

Guidelines are great when they work, but it's foolish to apply them
when it's not pragmatic. And they're not pragmatic on these
Kronos edits. Go to the Nonesuch webpage. If Flash works for you, you'll
see a list of artists. Click on Kronos then click on discography. You'll
get a list of releases that Nonesuch attributes to the Kronos Quartet.

If you change album artist to composer on these albums, they get buried
on the composer page, where they're easily overlooked and where a lot
of people (I'd guest most) don't expect them to be, and you leave a
void in the Kronos artist entry. Look at the moderation history for
Kronos, and count the number of dupes that were attempted to be entered
before the album artist was changed (mostly before support for it
existed). So what practical good does moving them do?

Record labels release music. MusicBrainz catalogs music. We have the
ability to designate album artist, and currently, on the edits in
question, album artist is in line with what the record label that
released the music says. So if you change that, not only do cause the
release information to diverge significantly from facts about releases,
but you violate the principle of least surprise. If you're going to that,
in my opinion, you had better have a good practical reason for doing so.

What's the reason?


Ryan