Skip to main content

Why voting in Discogs is broken

I just need to rant again about something in Discogs that I really do not like and that is the voting system. In Discogs you can vote on the quality of the data of a release. For example, if someone completely screwed up an existing release, you can vote that it is "Entirely Incorrect" and that will then revert the commit and restore it to the previous state. Or, you could vote that it is "Complete and Correct", signalling that all the data that can be on there is on there and it is correct as well. There are also:
  • Correct - not all information might be there, but at least it is correct
  • Needs Minor Changes - information is there, just needs a quick brush up
  • Needs Major Changes - the release needs a lot of work
This is to have some sort of "self cleansing" mechanism, to alert people to mistakes, and to weed out bad contributors, as getting many bad votes will put you into "Discogs school" (the "Contrinbutor Improvement Program", or "CIP") and so on. Except: it doesn't always work. Let me tell you why and walk through a few scenarios and then talk about how it can be done better.

A vote is cast on the entire release, not just on the latest edit. That means that if you are changing a release as a janitor, but there is garbage in the release that you don't know about because of whatever reason, you can still get bad votes because of what someone else did. So if you don't want any bad votes you should not try to improve releases other people added unless you really know what you are doing (personally I don't care too much about bad votes). But the problem here is that basically people will prefer having a release with bad data over having a release with a little bit less bad data, just because the changes that were made were not perfect. It is mind boggling.

The biggest problem however is that certain actions, such as adding pictures, or adding a release to a master release does not seem to fall into scope of the voting system! I have had it that I made a change to a release, someone else than changed the pictures of the release to something that was completely wrong and then someone else voted "Entirely Incorrect", not only reverting my (correct) change, but also leaving the wrong pictures, as these were not reverted by Discogs. Sigh.

There are also some people playing "turf wars" using the voting system, using bad votes to take revenge on someone. It is quite childish, but hey, that's the Internet for you.

A better voting system

What I think would work a lot better is if it would be possible to flag parts of the data as incorrect. That way people doing edits won't be punished for others screwing up. At the minimum I would like to see this done for pictures or pictures and adding releases to a master release to be taken into account.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SID codes (part 1)

One thing that I only learned about after using Discogs is the so called Source Identification Code, or SID. These codes were introduced in 1994 to combat piracy and to find out on which machines a CD was made. It was introduced by Philips and adopted by IFPI, and specifications are publicly available which clearly describe the two available SID codes (mastering SID code and mould SID code). Since quite a few months Discogs has two fields available in the " Barcode and Other Identifiers " (BaOI) section: Mould SID code Mastering SID code A few questions immediately popped up in my mind: how many releases don't have a SID field defined when there should be (for example, the free text field indicates it is a SID field)? how many releases have a SID field with values that should not be in the SID field? how many release have a SID field, but a wrong year (as SID codes were only introduced in 1994) how many vinyl releases have a SID code defined (which is impossi
1 comment
Read more

SPARS codes (part 1)

Let's talk about SPARS codes used on CDs (or CD-like formats). You have most likely seen it used, but maybe don't know its name. The SPARS code is a three letter code indicating if recording, mixing and mastering were analogue or digital. For example they could look like the ones below. There is not a fixed format, so there are other variants as well. Personally I am not paying too much attention to these codes (I simply do not care), but in the classical music world if something was labeled as DDD (so everything digital) companies could ask premium prices. That makes it interesting information to mine and unlock, which is something that Discogs does not allow people to do when searching (yet!) even though it could be a helpful filter. I wanted to see if it can be used as an identifier to tell releases apart (are there similar releases where the only difference is the SPARS code?). SPARS code in Discogs Since a few months SPARS is a separate field in the Discogs
Post a Comment
Read more

Country statistics (part 2)

One thing I wondered about: for how many releases is the country field changed? I looked at the two most recent data dumps (covering February and March 2019) and see where they differed. In total 5274 releases "moved". The top 20 moves are: unknown -> US: 454 Germany -> Europe: 319 UK & Europe -> Europe: 217 unknown -> UK: 178 UK -> Europe: 149 Netherlands -> Europe: 147 unknown -> Europe: 139 unknown -> Germany: 120 UK -> US: 118 Europe -> Germany: 84 US -> UK: 79 USA & Canada -> US: 76 US -> Canada: 65 unknown -> France: 64 UK -> UK & Europe: 62 UK & Europe -> UK: 51 France -> Europe: 51 Saudi Arabia -> United Arab Emirates: 49 US -> Europe: 46 unknown -> Japan: 45 When you think about it these all make sense (there was a big consolidation in Europe in the 1980s and releases for multiple countries were made in a single pressing plant) but there are also a few weird changes:
Post a Comment
Read more