Ranting time. Something that I think Discogs got right is that when editing a release you can see the entire editing history and view earlier versions of the page. This makes it lot easier to see when a particular change was introduced and allow you to "debug" a page: some people make changes that turn out to be wrong, or information got lost and it needs to be restored, or a page got vandalized (there are a few disgruntled ex-users that come and go and changes need to be reverted. Having the entire history available makes that possible. Other collaborative systems like Wikipedia have this feature as well where it has proven to be incredibly useful.
In Discogs it is mandatory to describe changes to releases in the so called submission notes. For me as a software engineer using open source software this is completely normal: you create a change, and describe the change, otherwise it becomes cumbersome down the line and you are asking yourself "what is this change and why did I make it?", or worse: "what is this change and why did that other person make it?" (usually with a few angry words thrown in). The Discogs submission guidelines are pretty clear:
"This section must be used to describe your submission or update. For example, on new submissions, you could disclose the source of the information, say you have checked all the links, and describe or explain anything out of the ordinary etc. For edits, please provide a brief description of the edit, and note the source of the information."
In practice this is not what I see. Some people enter the date of the change (unnecessary, as the system keeps track of that), their username (unnecesary, the system keeps track of that as well), or random characters (useless). What these people don't seem to realize is that not only makes it more difficult, it also annoys people: for every change that is done a message is sent to everyone who has said they own the record or who has contributed to the release. For people with tens of thousands of releases in their collection, or who contributed to many releases, it just becomes very annoying to keep up with useless, or incorrect, submission notes and checking every change, meaning that errors possibly slip through, and you end up with situations in the marketplace that I described earlier.
One thing that I do find frustrating is that some people are entering information about the release in the submission notes. At the moment Discogs is not making the edit history and submission notes available for download, but I am pretty sure that I could mine a lot of interesting information about it. I suppose it is time to hit their request tracker again...
In Discogs it is mandatory to describe changes to releases in the so called submission notes. For me as a software engineer using open source software this is completely normal: you create a change, and describe the change, otherwise it becomes cumbersome down the line and you are asking yourself "what is this change and why did I make it?", or worse: "what is this change and why did that other person make it?" (usually with a few angry words thrown in). The Discogs submission guidelines are pretty clear:
"This section must be used to describe your submission or update. For example, on new submissions, you could disclose the source of the information, say you have checked all the links, and describe or explain anything out of the ordinary etc. For edits, please provide a brief description of the edit, and note the source of the information."
In practice this is not what I see. Some people enter the date of the change (unnecessary, as the system keeps track of that), their username (unnecesary, the system keeps track of that as well), or random characters (useless). What these people don't seem to realize is that not only makes it more difficult, it also annoys people: for every change that is done a message is sent to everyone who has said they own the record or who has contributed to the release. For people with tens of thousands of releases in their collection, or who contributed to many releases, it just becomes very annoying to keep up with useless, or incorrect, submission notes and checking every change, meaning that errors possibly slip through, and you end up with situations in the marketplace that I described earlier.
One thing that I do find frustrating is that some people are entering information about the release in the submission notes. At the moment Discogs is not making the edit history and submission notes available for download, but I am pretty sure that I could mine a lot of interesting information about it. I suppose it is time to hit their request tracker again...
Comments
Post a Comment