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Finding spelling errors in Czechoslovak and Czech releases on Discogs


Time for a short, but positive post!

Today I got validation that what I do is actually useful for people working with Discogs. While sharing the findings of the previous article about Czechoslovakian manufacturing date codes we were asked if we could also search for a particular misspelling in Czech releases that are impossible to find with the Discogs search functionality.

Apparently the Czech alphabet has a character (ě) that looks a lot like another character (ĕ) and it is difficult for non-Czechs to spot the difference (it took me some time as well), so there was the suspicion that there would be releases where one was used instead the other, but Discogs does not allow you to search for these characters (according to one user on the Czechoslovak forum).

Adding another check to my scripts was fairly trivial (I only had to take care to not search the YouTube playlists as well, which are probably not that interesting). The result: around 90 releases, the results of which have been shared with people on the forums (results that were shared might have been from an instance of the script where the YouTube playlists were not ignored).

Probably there are more users on Discogs who do not know that it is possible to search the Discogs data in a fairly efficient way, and who are doing manual searches that actually could be fully automated. Some of them probably have in depth knowledge about all kinds of bugs in the data, that could easily be turned into patterns.
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