Month: April 2019

MusicBrainz Server update, 2019-04-26

We finally have a new release! Some large conversions of the MusicBrainz website templates to React happened during the past three months, leading to a long delay between releases – sorry about that! This release also fixes several bugs and adds some small improvements.

Thanks to Cyna, Ge0rg3, and spellew for their contributed code, mostly written during GCI. Also, thanks to alpinetux, amCap1712, chirlu, culinko, cyberskull, derobert, Griomo, hibiscuskazeneko, Jeluang, jessew, kepstin, Kid Devine, ListMyCDs.com, Lotheric, mfmeulenbelt, rafwuk, RavenWorks, samj1912, yindesu, yurim, and everyone who tested beta version, reported issues, or updated website translations.

The git tag is v-2019-04-26.

Bug

  • [MBS-6895] – Cannot inc=tags when browsing releases
  • [MBS-8634] – Privileged user accounts page still mentions the style council
  • [MBS-9013] – Removing specific ordering of relationships doesn’t create an edit
  • [MBS-9276] – Transient test failure in Edit::Instrument::Merge
  • [MBS-9297] – “Set track lengths” from Disc ID with no change should not be allowed
  • [MBS-9309] – Mediums fail to merge when two recording positions are swapped
  • [MBS-9400] – Tags are missing from artist nodes in /ws/2/release JSON requests
  • [MBS-9413] – Older “Remove relationship” edits can’t be loaded
  • [MBS-9669] – UI language menu not available in Spanish and Greek
  • [MBS-9845] – country.null stats not being collected
  • [MBS-9893] – Batch voting check boxes disappeared
  • [MBS-9899] – Recording and recording artist tags/genres missing in JSON WS
  • [MBS-9943] – Autocomplete.js is pretty much untranslatable
  • [MBS-9975] – Clicking the “A-a” button (guess sort name) to add a release alias sort name does not work.
  • [MBS-9983] – Non-group artists statistics does not include characters
  • [MBS-9985] – “Last updated on Invalid date” on release sidebar
  • [MBS-9986] – RG types not translated on sidebar
  • [MBS-9991] – Relationship names are not translatable
  • [MBS-9993] – MusicBrainz server should allow CORS requests to /oauth/token
  • [MBS-9995] – Space missing in autoeditor election text
  • [MBS-10009] – Some sidebar types are not translated
  • [MBS-10021] – ArtistRoles is not translatable
  • [MBS-10027] – t::MusicBrainz::Server::Controller::Admin::EditBanner fails randomly
  • [MBS-10031] – Tooltip says ‘null’ for artist names in ‘writer’ column of ‘work’ search results
  • [MBS-10033] – Missing space after Wikipedia blurb
  • [MBS-10045] – Regression: External links to Anison Generation in the sidebar appends https
  • [MBS-10075] – Release with no mediums disappears from release collection when sorting on format/no. of tracks
  • [MBS-10081] – Invalid last updated date on search result pages
  • [MBS-10084] – Unable to add CDBaby URL containing “ï”
  • [MBS-10085] – Long URL fails to wrap on release page in Chrome
  • [MBS-10088] – Example search for relationships breaks with cardinality
  • [MBS-10090] – Loading a doc page containing %3F loads full wikipage html
  • [MBS-10099] – Lyrics URL relationship uses the wrong link phrase on work edit page

Improvement

  • [MBS-6574] – Recursive area tabs
  • [MBS-7463] – Add redirect from /tag to /tags
  • [MBS-8782] – Show artist name on “Edit Note” tab of “Edit Release” page
  • [MBS-8922] – User reporting: Remove “Reveal my email address” option (or default it to on)
  • [MBS-9340] – Don’t allow more languages if [No lyrics] is selected
  • [MBS-9656] – [Change release quality] → [Change data quality]
  • [MBS-9935] – Indicate what to do with annotation reports
  • [MBS-9936] – Move from CJS style to ES6 (imports, exports)
  • [MBS-9988] – On /tags page, allow to go back to not showing downvoted tags
  • [MBS-9989] – Add new “Not applicable” gender option to stats
  • [MBS-9990] – Make formatUserDate error rather than return wrong date if given object
  • [MBS-9998] – Improve cleanup of Facebook URLs
  • [MBS-10008] – Generalize and localize CPDL link’s title in the sidebar
  • [MBS-10010] – Simplify sidebar_name methods for URLs
  • [MBS-10029] – When viewing edits by editor X, include editor X in the page title
  • [MBS-10032] – Detect and clean iTunes “author” URLs for artists
  • [MBS-10063] – “No linguistic content” → “[No lyrics]” in work edits display
  • [MBS-10074] – Display – on release search results for format/tracks if no medium exists
  • [MBS-10094] – Right-justify barcode on release group page
  • [MBS-10101] – Allow SecondHandSongs performance URLs for Recordings
  • [MBS-10102] – Use the containing country area of artists and labels for country statistics
  • [MBS-10103] – Update Bandsintown URL cleanup to strip languages

New Feature

  • [MBS-10011] – Congratulate/thank users on their birthdays
  • [MBS-10022] – Event tab for areas

React conversion task

  • [MBS-9632] – Convert statistics to React
  • [MBS-9699] – Convert the user account pages to React
  • [MBS-9904] – Convert the list of privileged users to React
  • [MBS-9909] – Convert report templates to React
  • [MBS-9926] – Convert entity subscribers pages to React
  • [MBS-10005] – Convert “Details” and ”Tags” tabs, for each entity, to React
  • [MBS-10007] – Convert “Add annotation” edit display to React
  • [MBS-10014] – Convert “Add area” edit display to React
  • [MBS-10015] – Convert “Add artist” edit display to React
  • [MBS-10016] – Convert “Add event” edit display to React
  • [MBS-10017] – Convert artist/cannot_split.tt to React
  • [MBS-10018] – Convert artist/special_purpose.tt to React
  • [MBS-10019] – Convert the artist and place event pages to React
  • [MBS-10026] – Convert the Labels page for Area to React
  • [MBS-10042] – Convert “Aliases” tab, for each entity, to React
  • [MBS-10046] – Convert /admin/banner/edit to React
  • [MBS-10049] – Convert user/report to React
  • [MBS-10086] – Convert attributes admin lists to React
  • [MBS-10091] – Convert root/components/relationships.tt to React

Other task

  • [MBS-8360] – Show BookBrainz relationships in the sidebar
  • [MBS-9082] – Standardize SecondHandSongs URLs
  • [MBS-9932] – Remove or update “Releases with superfluous data tracks” report
  • [MBS-9999] – Allow setting custom redirect URI while registering applications to be installed
  • [MBS-10035] – Add text to the “Report editor” page asking for links
  • [MBS-10036] – Add ccMixter.org to other database whitelist
  • [MBS-10037] – Send editor reports to MB user admin mailing list
  • [MBS-10080] – Relabel “MusicBrainz Blog” link as “MetaBrainz Blog” on MusicBrainz frontpage

Mini ListenBrainz update released today

Following up on our release from last week, we found a number of minor problems in production that were really hard to spot on our test setup. Sometimes you need to have real data flowing through your system before you can find the real problems.

The following pull requests were merged and released just now:

This should hopefully make the follow page work a little better for everyone. 🙂

Automating the voting system

MetaMetaData

For the last several years, one of the things our community has struggled with is a lack of active voters. We’ve tried to implement various measures to decrease the need for voters and load for the wonderful ones that actually do actively look through edits and help vote on them—e.g., making more edits auto‐edits and decreasing amount of time edits stay open. However, the edit queue is still quite unwieldy and as such we’ve kept trying to come up with other ways to decrease the load on our contributors.

Over the past few months since our last summit, we’ve been working on training AIs, both for recommendation engines and data analytics, and for helping out with spam, but it soon appeared that we had another valuable dataset: our history of 15,693,824 votes from 16,336 voters and 56,374,198 edits from 2,007,134 editors. It turns out that this is an unintended side-effects of the editing and voting system in that it creates a paper trail of our habits as a community and our collective mind.

A paper trail that you could, say, train a neural network on. And that’s just what we did.

By feeding data from our top voters, we’ve been able to train our network to replicate with 96.4% accuracy the personality when using the other half as test data. That figure is the average for 300 bots each based on our top 300 voters.
We were really impressed with the results but the story doesn’t stop there…

Meet BrainzVoter

The next logical step was to create our own Frankenstein’s monster. By training on 70% of our entire set of votes, we gave birth to a voting bot that represents the essence of our community. “BrainzVoter”, as we dubbed it, is precise and scores a staggering 98.9% accuracy on test data and comparing with the other 30% of our dataset.

To quote the late Terry Pratchet:

Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.

Edit filters

In view of the recent developments on net neutrality taken by the European Union with articles 11 & 13/17, MusicBrainz is taking measures to protect against copyright infringement: we’re implementing automatic edit filters. BrainzVoter will use the latest in NLP technology to understand what you, the editors, write in your edit notes, and use this understanding to vote on your edit. It will also inspect any URLs included in the edit note to cross-reference the data. The aggregate data will not be available to the public.

Edits with better and clearer notes will become more likely to pass. Consider this a good opportunity to (re‐)read How to Write Edit Notes!

How will this affect me as an editor?

Not much will change, and you can continue doing what you were doing before! We recommend that you take the time to make clear statements in your edit notes.
You will also be able to use a system of tags to express intent, using for example #typo #correction in the content of your edit text. Syntax highlighting and shortcuts will be available in the text editor.

In the end, by removing the need for humans to look over edits, the bot should give you, the editor, more time to add and edit and fix data in MusicBrainz, without having to spend time checking everyone else’s edits or worry about other editors disagreeing with yours!

After a brief trial period on MusicBrainz, this system will be adapted and also rolled out to BookBrainz.

We hope you will share our excitement for the benefits of automation and help us improve our training models over time. I, for one, welcome our AI overlords.