Category: Community

Wendell and Sergey from MusicIP have done another crawl of Wikipedia — this time the goal was to match up releases in MusicBrainz with Wikipedia pages that exist for those releases.

Just like last time the results have been broken into convenient chunks of 100 with the proper links to let people verify the matches and quickly enter them into MusicBrainz.

If you’re interested in helping, please follow the instructions on the wiki and jump in!

Thanks!

MusicIP did some matching between the MusicBrainz data and Wikipedia in order to find artists inside MusicBrainz that didn’t yet have an AR link referencing their Wikipedia page. Brian Freud then went and created a set of pages that make adding these links a snap.

Now we need more help picking up a section of the list and going through each of the listed artists and adding the ARs. If you’re interested in helping out, please take a look at the wiki page that coordinates this effort.

Thanks!

The style guideline process has been stuck in neutral for quite some time and I was hoping that Panda could take over this role from Don Redman (who had been swallowed up by real life quite some time ago), but real life is about to swallow Panda for the foreseeable future. Thus, I start the search for a new leader of the Style Council once again.

The new leader for the style council would need to:

1. Review the process by which style guidelines get updated. Obviously this process is flawed.
2. Devise a new method by which the style council works on style guidelines. The new leader can choose to use the Wiki, the bug tracker, mailing lists, forums, smoke signals or anything else they choose. This process has to fit with the structure of MusicBrainz and our bottom up method for working together. I will personally work with the new style leader to define this process.
3. Document and implement the new process
4. Lead the style council.

Qualifications of the new style leader include:

1. Excellent communication skills
2. Excellent knowledge in music, especially classical.
3. Must not be embattled in current proposals. Ideally the leader would be neutral on existing proposals and keep an objective stance on new proposals as they move through the process.
4. Skillz in bringing about consensus. We need a strong communicator who can settle long raging debates and use their judgement to settle debates and remove contentious points from discussion. This leader needs to keep people focused when debates rage out of control.

I would very much like to see the new style process be a bottom up process where the community brings about proposals much like they do today. The major difference is that the new style leader would have the authority and presence to move these proposals along when they get stuck. My vision is that this person isn’t a nanny who micro-manages the community of style people, but rather one who provides lubrication for the process to run smoothly. If something gets stuck, forgotten or argued to death, the leader should jump in an rectify the situation.

If this position interests you, please speak up in the comments. If you think someone in the community would make an excellent leader, but suspect that this person isn’t going to speak up, please nominate them in the comments. I will take the proposed people, chat with them and chat with members in the community to see how they feel about this person. Then, I’ll make a benevolent dictator decision and install the new style council leader and set them off to their task.

If so, please re-read the Wiki page and follow the instructions at the top of the page. I’m looking forward to meeting up with everyone on Friday!

After last year’s invite-only summit, its time to have another summit with a more informal agenda and an open invite:

What: MusicBrainz Summit #9

Where: London, England (exact details will be posted later)

When: 10 May

Who: You!

The rough plan is to have a general socializing evening on Friday as people trickle in from all corners of Europe (UK, Sweden and Germany). Then on Saturday May 10 we will find a quiet place to sit and discuss some of the following issues:

1. Google Summer of Code — All three students and two mentors will be present.
2. MusicBrainz server development over the summer. Perl, python, Template::Toolkit
3. Picard and Alexander’s SoC project to improve usability
4. Niklas Berglund’s Music Collection project for SoC
5. Next Generation Schema (NGS) and how that is impacted by the summer coding sprint
6. The BBC’s efforts to help MusicBrainz with NGS.
7. Your favorite topics as time allows

We’ve asked last.fm to allow us to hold the daytime events at the last.fm office. Personally, I want to play in the last.fm ball pit — who doesn’t? After the day-time activities we’ll find a pub and a have some drinks as we wind the day down. Then sunday morning everyone will scatter back to their respective corners of Europe.

We’re currently working to find crash spaces on couches and floors in various Londoner’s flats — if you live in London and can put up a brainzer on your couch, please speak up!

We’re coordinating arrivals times and summit details on the Summit #9 wiki page. Please add yourself if you plan to come — at time of writing, we’re up to 11 people! Watch the wiki page for details as we get closer to the event.

yes you read right, This month’s cleanup is a little different, because it is the SpecialPurposeArtist, [unknown]

[unknown] has a little bit for everyone, and its really rather simple, just randomly pic a release and have at it with google, yahoo, wikipedia, discogs or whathaveyou

fix it up and move on, we will mainly be interested in trying to empty out the [unknown] artist as well as cleaning up any wrongly attributed stuff or dupes related to it

if you know any obscure or somewhat interesting discography sites for several artists bookmarked, here is a chance to add it to [unknown]s sub-page

Good luck and happy editing!

Derek Sivers, the owner of CD Baby and a general MusicBrainz fan has recently integrated a sounds-like feature into CD Baby that uses MusicBrainz data. Derek says:

Cooooooooooool!

http://cdbaby.com/found?soundlike= 678d88b2-87b0-403b-b63d-5da7465aecc3

http://cdbaby.com/found?soundlike= 87c5dedd-371d-4a53-9f7f-80522fb7f3cb

and thanks to your wonderful aliases:

http://cdbaby.com/found?allsearch=biggie

… will pull up The Notorious B.I.G., etc.

This feature allows CD Baby users to search for CD Baby artists who sound like similar artists that might be cataloged in MusicBrainz. This feature also cross references MusicBrainz artist aliases for an even greater effect: If a CD Baby artist says they sound like “The Notorious B.I.G.” and a customer searches for “biggie”, they will find this artist.

Very nice work Derek!

Renamed and Renewed the CotM, now dubbed “Cleanup of the Month”
has been resurrected and given a new header, this time It is Ennio Morricone, everybodies favourite Spaghetti-western composer.

How can I help?

* if you have any Ennio Morricone releases, please add them, and or their TOC to the database, update the label info
* if you got some spare time, lookup some links for us to use and add them to the Ennio Morricone CotM sub-page
* try to get anyone possibly interested in doing some editing in this area to join, we can’t do this community effort without the community!

good luck and happy editing!

I recently gave a presentation about MusicBrainz/MetaBrainz to the Queen Mary University in London. The talk was billed as:

“MusicBrainz: Tearing Down Walled Gardens in the Music Industry”

If you’re curious about the beginnings of MusicBrainz, my sugar mama or how MusicBrainz and its IDs hopes to change the world, you may want to watch the video stream of my presentation.

Thanks to Steve Welburn for inviting me!