[mb-users] MusicBrainz Local (Future Development)

[Olivier]

2008/3/26, Joel Bryan Juliano <joelbryan.juliano at gmail.com>:
> Hi,
>
>  I was very fond of using musicbrainz and am really thankful of it's
>  worthwhile innovations. Automatically, most of my music are matched,
>  but not all. The local bands and local artists are the ones that I
>  would need to manually import or manually create.
>
>  In Ubuntu, they have a very nice support system for localizations.
>  Every applications have it's own "Translate this application" linking
>  to Launchpad. The good thing is they also have LoCo groups who
>  specializes on localisations, and with great success, almost all the
>  languages are translated.
>
>  As I was creating a local artist entry in MusicBrainz, I realized that
>  the idea of
>  local music groups specialization for MusicBrainz would be really helpful.
>
>  So I would like to propose the creation of MusicBrainz Localizations,
>  where each loco groups would specialized on the creation of local
>  artists & local bands, I think it would be a great help just for
>  MusicBrainz Piccard to query for a particular local song and
>  expectedly provide the necessary informations.
>

Hi Joel,

First of, if you are not aware of them, there are
http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/InternationalArtists pages that lists
artists grouped by country of origin. These pages are regularly used
by these of us who indeed work on "local" groups.

There also exists the http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/ModeratorLanguage
pages, which (usually :/) list all wikizens fluent in a given language
(these are added from backlinks in CategoryPerson pages). <-
unfortunately, the fullsearch macro is temporarily disabled, but this
will get fixed soon (err, should :-]).

Also note the http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/CapitalizationStandard are
usually presented in both English and the given native language.

>  Probably to start with, MusicBrainz would create those sites for the
>  local people to join in.
>
>  Just a simple idea, but a really helpful one.

Well, the mentioned wiki pages somehow serve that purpose - though we
could definitely make something better, more organized? - maybe
"local" portals or something like that to present this in a more
easily accessible way?

As for providing translations for the whole documentation, I think
it's kind of a different beast.
This was attempted in the past by the venerable "CatCat" (a.k.a.
"several nicknames" :-]), but never took of the ground, for a number
of reasons:
 * we lack the technical infrastructure to make these "localized"
documentation maintainable
 * we lack developers (motivation :]) to provide such an infrastructure
 * we so badly lack arms editing the wiki that even the (main) English
documentation is slacking in several ways and the subject to many
disagreements and dissatisfaction. That EN documentation itself is
currently under a (permanent :/) restructuring effort that will likely
take several more months before it reaches a somewhat satisfactory
form (eg: consistent).

Now, far from me the idea of discouraging you, but even the
(supposedly "big" but utterly lazy :]) French MB community IMO is not
ready for the work implied by such a task.



Still, making MB less English centric is *definitely* a goal, and any
specific ideas or will-to-do-that *definitely* are welcome!


Regards,

- Olivier