[mb-users] Is their an artist property for an artists

[Brian Schweitzer]

> > 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.

I would disagree on two points.

First, 9 out of 10 times, how is any artist identified?  "A group from
Liverpool, founded in 1962", "A singer from California", "An Italian
soundtrack composer", etc.    I think, especially as we look towards
making the artist page more useful and informative, this is a very
needed bit of info.

Second, if you think about it, we've already begun to store this type
of info, just in a very inconsistant way.  Think about almost every
disambiguation comment you've seen.  "UK singer", "Italian composer",
"Japanese punk group", etc.  What tends to be in most disambiguation
comments?  Genre and country/state.  I think having a way to store the
location would not just improve our existing data, but would also help
avoid incorrect data being added in the future, by making consistant
the location disambiguation, even for those artists who currently are
the only artists in the database with that name.

If someone is adding, say, an AR for a release, and they look for
"Sally Smith", chances are, if they find a Sally Smith, and she's the
only Sally Smith in the database, they're going to assume that Sally
Smith is the one they want.  Only if they find multiple Sally Smiths
do people normally check which one is the right one.  (Speaking
realistically here - we all would hope people would check if it's the
right person even if there's only one listed...  but we know that
doesn't really happen as much as we would like.)

Now, assume I'm adding ARs for a Japanese band.  I need to set an AR
for Sally Smith.  If I see "Sally Smith (Tennessee, USA)", I'm much
less likely to assume it's the right Sally Smith, knowing that the one
I want is from, say, Tokyo - and so I add a new Sally Smith.  We thus
better avoid having multiple artists mixed together inadvertently,
especially in the place (ARs) where it's the biggest pain for someone
to verify, split out, and fix later.

Brian