[mb-style] Band name changes (was [mb-devel] Panic! at the Disco)

[Lauri Watts]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 11:12 AM, Chris B <chris at whenironsattack.com> wrote:

>  currently we would (all else being equal) merge to the most useful
>  (ie, popular) name, which has manifest benefits for both the
>  discography and the tagger (as previously mentioned). if we retain

If it's so simple to determine which one is 'the most popular' to
merge them into,
it's equally simple to use that same one to base the AR's from.

>  i don't buy that we should 'prepare' the data for NGS - isn't that the
>  reason we're having NGS in the first place? because such an 'accurate'
>  DB structure is unsuitable for our needs without major DB and display
>  changes. obviously there's going to be significant editing work across
>  the board once we go to NGS from our current 'amended' data anyway...
>
That it helps sort things out in the future when we can have them on one page
is just an extra benefit.

The point is, many users do not want their albums released and widely available
for many years under one artist name to be automatically changed to
the other.

This occurs so often that  we _do_ already have artists that are
recreated constantly,
we _do_ already have duplicates in the database solely to cope with
split discographies,
and we _do_ already have users using the performs as AR to connect
them.  And some
of these artists are the cause of intense arguments, every single time
they get merged
(Wendy vs. Walter Carlos, for the obvious one)

The _intention_ is, to stop pretending we don't have this situation
and that most users
are actually happy having everything always merged, because let's face
it, while merges
often make sense, they sometimes don't.   Nobody is suggesting we keep split
discographies for every single name variation and alias, only in the cases where
it's already obvious that the discographies are split, keep being
split, keep being merged
and get duped when users are unhappy with the current situation. Just
like we do
for people.

Let's instead use the tools already at our disposal to deal with it in
some manner.
Acknowledge that there is a problem in a small few situations, not
bury our heads
in the sand and continue to argue about it every time Walter gets merged into
Walter, or her entire back catalogue gets imported yet again under the
other name.

Performs as AR (or a new AR to replace it) seems to already work fine,
in the situations
it's appropriate.  I want to either explicitly allow it's use or
replace it with a similar AR only
for bands.

-- 
Lauri Watts