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What happened in Discogs in October 2017?

A new dumpfile was uploaded by Discogs, so I launched my scripts again to see what happened in Discogs in October 2017.

Release statistics

The new dumpfile ("the November dump") was released on November 4 2017 and has 9,107,428 releases. The previous dump ("the October dump") was released on October 4 2017 and had 8,996,419 releases. That means 111,009  more releases in the database. Of these:
  • 8,455,978 releases stayed the same
  • 537,679 releases were changed
  • 113,771 releases were added
  • 2,762 releases were removed
  • 222 releases had the status Draft, Deleted or Rejected set
  • 11 releases that were not Accepted were present in the October and November data dump
  • 1 release moved from Draft to Accepted
What stands out is that fewer new releases were added than in September even though October was 1 day longer. But in September Discogs had organized a contest called S.P.IN (September Pledge INiative), where people were encouraged to add new releases to the database. What is striking is that many more existing releases were changed: 11% more releases than in September 2017.
October 2017 saw fewer new releases added than September 2017, but significantly more edits of existing releases (11% increase).
 In total there were edits for 651,450 releases. There were 44,640 minutes in October 2017, meaning there were a bit over 14.5 edits (new or changed releases) per minute, compared to 12.5 edits per minute in September 2017.
This means that there was one edit every 4 seconds, compared to one edit every 5 seconds in September 2017.
In October 2017 there was one edit in the Discogs catalogue every four seconds

Releases with known smells

To make a fair comparison I first ran the scripts on the previous datadump, as I had updated some of the scripts and more smells were found.

In October: 212,772 smells were found, compared to 220,387 in September 2017, meaning 7,600 fewer entries with smells. These numbers are not exact though: there are some known issues with finding the Depósito Legal field in the Notes section as these are processed and reported before there is a check if there actually is a Depósito Legal section. This will be improved in a future version of the scripts.

In October 1,022 entries were added with a known smell (where my scripts found something), which is not too bad. Most of these seem to come from people not understanding what a Label Code is, people copying old entries as templates and changing the fields on a per needed basis without fixing the wrong fields, or people following old habits.

So to answer last month's question: the quality of releases is increasing, but we still have a very long way to go. Let's see in a month what will have happened in November 2017!




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