[mb-style] Composition/Performer/Production ARs at Release or Track level? - PROPOSAL

[Lauri Watts]

On Jan 3, 2008 8:41 AM, Jim DeLaHunt <from.nabble at jdlh.com> wrote:
>
> Bram has said just exactly what I wanted to say. A release-level AR means
> that the person or group had the relationship for some or all of the
> release, just as the track-level AR means they had the relationship for some
> or all of the track.

And some of us have been editing for years with a quite different
understanding of how it should work.

> I was on the verge of writing this down in
> http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/ArtistRoleInheritance .  I'm a newly-arrived MB
> contributor. That page was very influential for me. Now I see that it misled
> me.  I think that it's important that it be rewritten to reflect whatever
> our new consensus turns out to be.

We have to actually _have_ a consensus before running around editing pages.

I strongly disagree with making release or worse band level AR's
assumed to be fuzzy, especially while they are understood to propagate
down to lower levels.

I also strongly disagree with auto-propagating AR's downwards, if lots
of people are currently adding them with the understanding they are
fuzzy.

That maybe seems contradictory, but that's the crux of the problem.
We're going to have to pick one, because right now we have the worst
of all situations; some people think they're fuzzy and are entering
them under that assumption, _and_ they're being autopropagated down by
Picard, if not the web interface.

As Aaron pointed out, this is only going to be worse when it's about
song's vs recorded instances of those songs.

Someone said that adding release level AR's on a fuzzy basis does not
equal unconfirmed data, but to those of us who assume release level =
applies to all tracks, that is _exactly_ what it equals.  Yet for
those who only enter release level AR's that actually apply to all
tracks, the rest who are assuming they are fuzzy are not getting the
benefit of that info, because you're automatically thinking 'well that
probably applies to most tracks, but not all'.

We can't accomodate both points of view, and trying to is just
resulting in a mess.

We just have to pick one, and document it _clearly_.  I don't
understand why everyone is so against writing down clear rules, when
not doing so results in all this ambiguity.

-- 
Lauri Watts