[mb-style] CSG compromise?

[Brian Schweitzer]

On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 1:47 PM, Mike Morrison <mikemorr at umich.edu> wrote:
>
>  On Sat, 1 Mar 2008, Leiv Hellebo wrote:
>  > The last month my focus has not been on fixing the CSG, but rather to
>  > say that I do not want us to standardise on one way of formatting one
>  > piece of classical (movement, lied etc.) in the CSGS pages and make this
>  > mandatory for how we should deal with that piece.
>
>  I think each user can get exactly what he or she wants with NGS. Here's
>  how:
>
>  The list of work titles currently known as CSGS, rather than being a
>  prescriptive list of the "one true way" to format each work's title, could
>  be structured as a database of all known classical works, with each work
>  title broken up into many subfields, like all the boxes and sub-boxes on
>
>  http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/BrianFreud/sandbox#CSGworkstructure
>
>  or
>
>  http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/BrianFreud/ClassicalOntology
>
>  Rather than "CSGS", I will call it the WorksDatabase.
<big snip>

Mike, on this concept, I wholeheartedly agree.  This is exactly the
thinking I had, re: NGS, when putting the second page together.  My
hope is that indeed we eventually get to a point where we can each
take all the parts and built as little or as much from them as we each
individually want.  Really, when that stage of NGS comes, I think a
lot of guidelines perhaps become unneeded - OperaStyle, CSG,
PartNumberStyle, VolumeStyle, DiscNumberStyle, etc - anything that
revolves around taking all the various possibilities that exist and
putting them into a consistant structure.

The problem really is, all of these guidelines accept that NGS at that
level is still a long way off.  All of CSG really is, I think, us
debating just which of the fields we're going to use/not use, in which
order, with which separators, etc.  Hence some of the debates, like
the whole en-dash/em-dash/dash/hyphen thing, where at least some of us
were talking about the utility of each being used for a specific
purpose, in that it would allow the track title to then be
deconstructed; in the most basic sense, allowing the track title to be
turned into semi-separated fields that a user could use to somewhat
build up what he or she wants.

And while I do see this eventual day where we can do all this, and
under such an NGS system, I look forward to the day I can support the
RFV to eliminate CGS and the others, the question is, what are we
going to do until then?  Whether we're shaping a track title under
CSG, or changing "Vol." to ", Volume", we're modifying things.  We
could agree to simply leave it unchanged, to add multiple listings for
the same release with multiple languages on the liner, etc.  But that
creates two problems:  essentially duplicate releases, when they're
really just a single release crying out for the "one release, multiple
possible track titles" solution; and the appearance of chaos in the
data, especially classical, for all the users who like well-ordered
information within the titles.

And I think that's really what we keep coming back to with these
debates.  I really don't think it's at all possible that we can come
to all agree here - some will always want "exactly as on the liner",
some will always want "as complete work identification as possible",
and some will always want something in between.  One other issue,
which I don't think we've quite mentioned, is that, as more and more
music moves to online-sales, in some, and progressively many, cases,
there ceases to even be the liner to depend upon - I can easily
imagine the day where Naxos or DG is releasing direct to online, where
titles are simply user-translated-on-the-fly using their own
NGS-equivalent mappings of works.

So until that happy day of NGS support, how do we compromise?  How can
we ensure that the data allows the BBC to identify the work from the
track, allows Aaron and me to tag and not find the data "quite messy",
allows Leivhe and David to tag and have complete but not "overly"
complete data, and still allows Lauri and her mother-in-law to tag and
have what she wants?  (Just using us as examples of general user-base
opinions here.)  If we're aiming for "as on the liner", which liner,
which translation, and what still gets fixed - caps, typos, mislisted
works, etc?  If we're aiming for CSG, how complete, which languages,
and are we essentially admitting that classical track titles per
liners are descriptions and not "titles" per say?  Where can we all
compromise such that the (I think majority) who wants at least some
structure in the titles isn't left waiting 1-2 years for NGS to
replace CSG, plus all the quite likely years of editing work to
actually implement it across our classical listings?

Brian