[mb-users] Open request for documentation review; ReleaseTerminology

[Johannes Dewender]

> In particular, I wrote http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/ReleaseDate from
> scratch, and as this is somewhat topical, I'd appreciate comments on
> it or enhancements to the page.
I added the info about the change from the release day from Monday to 
Friday in Germany. This time I took the time to find a source and an 
exact date when this happened.

I would like to remove this sentence (with an axe):

"Possible sources include [...] other online music databases (Discogs, 
Wikipedia etc)"

I don't see why anybody should use these as a source. They are no 
authority with this and it is highly misleading. Both take the date 
from somewhere else, nearly always without stating any source. I had 
many cases where the release date was just wrong because of that. Taken 
from a completely different release, the cover or something else 
that "seems fitting".
There is nothing wrong about looking these up and see if they state a 
source and use it then, but I wouldn't encourage people to use discogs 
or wikipedia as a source (or musik-sammler etc.)
You can give a link and argue a bit about different dates, but it is no 
real source.

Because people might think about it:
I wouldn't encourage people to use Musicbrainz as a event source either, 
when they want to build up their own database. For personal use this is 
perfectly fine. Everbody can safely tag the data, of course; but when 
you want to re-use this in another database you also have to look up if 
MB gives a source for the date.

Discogs is okay as a source for other things, especially when images are 
present, but certainly not for release dates. Wikipedia itself 
shouldn't be a source for anything. It is great to get a personal 
overview, but by far not good enough to base a DB on it.

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