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

[Kuno Woudt]

On Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 07:22:45PM -0500, Tracy Poff wrote:
> I meant this not as
> 'someone could go get a book and look it up' but rather as 'we could
> programmatically retrieve and display this data whenever we need to'.
> 
> I think that our work should focus on data about releases--who
> performed them, who wrote them, who published them and when, etc.
> Biographical data about artists--even birth dates--are really
> secondary to this (or should be, in my opinion). I don't dispute that
> these are useful, I was just pointing out that ideally it wouldn't be
> up to us to keep track of these things. We'd be able to say 'this is
> the artist with SuperCoolDatabaseID #12345' and the server could
> retrieve that sort of stuff automatically (and, of course,
> SuperCoolDatabase could get our info from us, too).

I agree with this notion.  If there is some other database with
biographical data with a usable API (and licensing), we should use 
that data and encourage users to edit (and discuss) that data on
whichever site we're using for that purpose.  I imagine we could 
have several sources for such information, as there may not be a
single source with a wide enough coverage.   As long we don't have such
a source, I'm OK with storing a few _basic_ biographical details, 
but see no real need to expand these beyond what we already have now.

-- Kuno.