[mb-users] Guess I'll boycott adding release events

[david scotson]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 5:23 AM, Ben Chobot <bench at silentmedia.com> wrote:
> Add what you can (defend), but remember that the only thing worse than
> no database is a database with probably inaccurate data.

I didn't mean to pick on this comment in particular, just respond to
the general perfectionism trend in responses, which I feel can be a
bit limiting, "the perfect is the enemy of the good" and all that, but
are we really saying that a possibly inaccurate database (e.g.
Wikipedia, discogs, IMDB, or MB as it is right now!) is worse than
those not existing at all? Seems just a tad extreme, particularly as
perfection while perhaps a worthy goal isn't attainable, pretty much
by definition.

Anyway, that's not my actual point, which is: isn't this just a simple
bug? Before we had a field for label, cat number or barcode all you
had were date and country. It kind of made sense to enforce them since
otherwise you weren't really adding anything. But today I'd suggest
getting the cat number and barcode are even more important as someone
can come along later and (with a bit of research/googling) work out
the rest just from those (probably either of those) two. Also
important is the fact that they are very simple to get from pretty
much any CD (or vinyl) and require no initiation in the deep secrets
of Musicbrainz. So is it time to revisit assumptions and maybe
entirely relax the constraints so you just have to have filled any one
field. (Country is a kind of exception here, as a dropdown list,
*something* is always selected, see the last paragraph for more)

The date field already accept blank/0 for the month and year, would it
really be that hard for it to accept 0000-00-00 too?

(This also reminds me of this bug, which I tripped over the other day:
Can't add artist birthdays without year:
http://bugs.musicbrainz.org/ticket/1241)

Finally, with particular reference to the original poster's problem if
you're unsure of the country for most of the releases you are adding
you can change the default country here:

http://musicbrainz.org/user/preferences.html

Just choose [Unknown Country] from the big list, it's at the bottom.

cheers,

dave