Re: [mb-style] Fwd: [mb-users] Cyrrilic

On Dec 20, 2005, at 5:37 AM, Don Redman wrote:

> Can we please settle this one?

Let's.

Here is how this will play out, consider this an official "ruling" on  
the matter:

At the summit and in particular the days after the summit, Stefan,  
Don and myself spoke about this quite a bit. I weighed two options  
for how to fix this [1] and [2] and had a lot of conversations about  
this topic. Then I flew to London and met up with the last.fm crew.  
One of their hot topics of the day was the issue of transliterations  
and that something needed to be done, quick. I outlined the two  
approaches to them, and the alias approach received a warm welcome  
and they said that they could integrate this approach into their  
system easily. The approach with duplicate artists would wreak havoc  
on their system and would be a lot of work for them.

Given all of these pieces of feedback, approach #1 is the most  
sensical approach to fix this problem. The steps we'll need to take  
to make this happen are:

A. Artists (mostly classical, but not asian -- please help me define  
this properly) in a non-latin script will contain the english-
transliterated version of their name in the artist.name and the  
english-transliterated sort name in the artist.sortname field. Much  
like the way we had it a few weeks ago.
B. Artist aliases will then be cleaned up to 1) indicate the type of  
an alias: typo, AKA, transliteration, etc 2) the language and script  
of the alias. What other alias types should we have?
C. Picard (and perhaps even the web site) get a 'preferred language/
script' option that users can set and if an alias in their language  
exists, Picard will use that alias for tagging.

This has the following benefits:

1. MB Tagger users will stop bothering us, since they get what they  
want.
2. Picard users get more flexibility for tagging their tracks and  
Picard now becomes even more important for tagging your tracks  
correctly.
3. Our customers are not greatly impacted.
4. Its not a hideous amount of code.

This has the following drawbacks:

1. This does not address album transliterations. This will need to  
wait until schema II
2. The database does not fully reflect the true name of the artist.  
This also will be fixed in schema II

So, then I would like to ask the style council to:

1. Define to what artists step A applies to.
2. Update the style guidelines to reflect A.
3. Encourage the community to fix current artists in dispute and make  
people aware of these pending changes.

This will be the next server release after SG5DR -- the exact date is  
still unknown, but early February is a decent guess as to when this  
will happen.

Thoughts??


[1] http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?
func=detail&aid=1059830&group_id=19506&atid=369506
[2] Add a duplicate artist with a transliterated name and add AR  
links between the two artists. Then we would need to tweak the artist  
pages to display albums from both artists.

--

--ruaok      Somewhere in Texas a village is *still* missing its idiot.

Robert Kaye     --     rob@...     --    http://mayhem-chaos.net


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