[mb-users] Is their an artist property for an artists place of birth ?

[Frederic Da Vitoria]

2007/11/6, Tracy Poff <tracy.poff at gmail.com>:
>
> I have a couple of things to reply to regarding wikipedia. Sorry for
> the lateness of my replies, but I was busy over the weekend.
>
> Frederic Da Vitoria <davitofrg at gmail.com> wrote:
> > You can't ask wikipedia for composers born in France currently,
> > and you probably never will
>
> Actually, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:French_composers.
> We don't list every conceivable category intersection (although we
> expect that one day you will be able to perform intersections, which
> should let you do whatever you like). There is an API for accessing
> this, so you can actually programmatically request this stuff.
>
> Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> > Everybody here seems to think of the English language Wikipedia.
> > The German language Wikipedia does encode dates and places of
> > birth and death in a systematic way.
>
> The English Wikipedia does this, too. It's called persondata (see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Persondata for more info). Not
> all articles have it, but it is being added to biographies, and
> eventually they all should have this.
>
> I tend to think that this sort of biographical data on artists isn't
> appropriate for musicbrainz (in an ideal world in which we could
> easily get the data elsewhere), but I'm not against its inclusion. I
> just think that we should be more focused on the music than the
> artists, generally.
>

Ok, then we can automatically use wikipedia. I still believe (but I may be
wrong) that MB answers to queries will be much faster if the data is local.
But we could (and maybe we even should) use these to check the accuracy of
the data we have in the MB database. I agree that purely biographical data
should be in places such as wikipedia rather than MB, but date and place of
birth are more than just biographical data, it is VERY music-related. If
Mozart's and Tracy Chapman's music are so different, it is because they were
born when and where they were born. Although the place is obviously only
statistically related, the place artists were raised has probably more
significance than the place they were born ;-) But still, it believe that,
statistically, music composed by artists born in the late 20th century will
be audibly different if they were born in New York or Johannesburg or
Peking. So a query for those born around NY would have a musical meaning.

-- 
Frederic Da Vitoria
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