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

[Philip Jägenstedt]

If possible, MusicBrainz could automatically mirror the data from
Wikipedia persondata and in fact do a local database search. The main
issue I think is to not duplicate efforts or create forks of existing
projects without a really good reason.

Cross-linking with different databases could allow all sorts of cool
searches. The immediately most interesting in my mind would be IMDb,
but I doubt they're willing to get with the 21st century.

Philip

On 11/6/07, Frederic Da Vitoria <davitofrg at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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