MetaBrainz Blog

Your favourite time of the year is at hand! No, I don’t mean Christmas, I (obviously) mean the Classical Community Clean Up. Debussy went very well, Mahler was fantastic, and it’s time for a third! Come join us in paying a little special attention to classical masters!

This time around the community has chosen (probably) the world’s only composer who is also a keyboard layout, the titan of Czech music Antonín Dvořák. We encourage you during this time to not only help the community clean up Dvořák’s metadata, but to learn more about Dvořák as well.

The clean up events officially last one month (but can be continued until they’re complete!) and are meant to utilize our community’s power to clean up our classical metadata. If you are new to MusicBrainz, to classical editing, or both, we have a whole tool box and plenty of advice, tips and tricks to share. We advise you bookmark the tool box—it’s quite helpful! Our team of classical music enthusiasts will also provide plenty of support on our forums, so come join us!

What we will work on:

• Reviewing the existing works to make sure there are no duplicates and the information looks correct, and add any missing works (keep in mind while it is perfectly ok to add lost works, it’d be good to specify they’re lost so that people don’t accidentally use them on recordings).
• Check the release list for anything that doesn’t follow the classical guidelines. Not only that should be fixed, but that’s a good sign of the recording and relationship info being incomplete too.
• Check the recording list. The only recordings that should be here by the end of the cleanup are of Dvořák himself as a performer (probably none, and in any case very few). Anything else being here should have performer relationships added to it if missing, then the artist credits for the recording should be changed to list the main performers (you can use the relevant script for that). Try to fix the whole release the recording is on, even if it’s not all by Dvořák! But in the case of a very large compilation, it’s always acceptable to fix only the Dvořák content on it.
• Add missing Dvořák recordings! If you have enough info to add a Dvořák release we’re missing, that’s always useful. Just make sure to try to add as much info as possible from the get go, so we don’t have to clean that addition up as well. 🙂

We recently had 2995 recordings, 781 works and 862 releases under Dvořák, and we’re expecting to have many fewer wrongly listed recordings and many more Dvořák releases by the end of the month. Don’t know where to begin? Join us and ask, let us help you find a jumping in point! Here’s to another great month of Classical Clean Up with Dvořák!

By the way, you can get the above poster and a wallpaper version courtesy of Chhavi, in case you feel like having Dvořák himself staring at you will motivate you further! 😉

As we published at the start of October, during the last month we’ve been trying to clean up our data for Gustav Mahler. October is over now, and you might be wondering how that went. Well, no need to wonder anymore, because our users have made a fantastic job not just of cleaning Mahler’s data up, but of showing us how clean it is!

Our editor stupidname took statistical snaps at the start, the midpoint and the end of the project:

As we can see, the existing recordings where mostly cleaned up 18 days in, but a lot of new releases kept being added up until the end of the month.

Additionally, stupidname also checked the amount of recordings for some of the main works by Mahler to see the changes over time (specifically, due to the way our works… err.. work, the data is for one movement of each work rather than the main work itself):

This data is a bit less precise, because some of these recordings are partial (and the specific organization of Symphony no. 8 makes it especially tricky to count), but it is still a very nice view of how we’ve gotten extra recordings of basically everything!

Our editor loujin made graphs with the amount of edits per editor during the cleanup. There are too many editors for the legend to show them all, but the graph shows that the two biggest contributors by far were ListMyCDs.com (green) and stupidname (light blue), with a bunch of other editors making several hundred edits as well.

And finally, also thanks to loujin, you can see how the cleanup affected the amount of edits done on Mahler (no prizes for guessing which bar it is!):

Thanks to all this hard work, our entry on Mahler should be a particularly good example of the amount and quality of classical data you can get from MusicBrainz, and an inspiration for other composer pages! Thanks so much to everyone, and we’ll be back with more in December!