Having looked through many releases in Discogs I often see that data is not entered as it is on the release. One example: rights societies are typeset in many different ways, where sometimes you will have an all uppper case name (for example: "BIEM"), sometimes there is spacing ("B I E M"), sometimes there are dots in the name ("B.I.E.M."), and so on.
In the examples mentioned above the values are all basically referencing the same rights society so it is worth asking if the values entered on each release page should be "as written on release" or if they should be stored as the value of whatever it is pointing it? Said differently: should the release page focus on "syntax" (how it is written on the release) or "semantics" (what it means)?
There are things to be said for both: there are releases where the person designing the sleeve or label made an error, for example: releases with "BIEN" instead of "BIEM". Writing it down as on the release would make it easier to discover ("all releases with rights society 'BIEN'", if Discogs would finally make such searches possible) but it could possibly also obscure the real meaning of the field: I wouldn't want to have to search for all different spellings of "BIEM" separately.
On the other hand: not having this information as on the release makes it hard to distinguish certain releases. A good example is the Spanish edition of "Maiden Japan". There are a few releases that are very close. Two of them are nearly identical, except the spelling of the rights society: one has "SGAE", the other "S.G.A.E." (both can currently be found on a single release page, but I don't know for how long. Click through the images to see the label variants). For those releases, with very small changes, having the information "as written on release" is essential.
Of course, these do not have to exclude eachother and in another part of Discogs it is already standard to have information as written on the release (syntax) and what it means (semantics), namely the "Artist Name Variation" or "ANV". In the ANV fields it is possible to add aliases for artists, while the release will be assigned to the artist's real name and will show up on the artist's profile page. This system works well, so why not repeat it for other data fields?
In the examples mentioned above the values are all basically referencing the same rights society so it is worth asking if the values entered on each release page should be "as written on release" or if they should be stored as the value of whatever it is pointing it? Said differently: should the release page focus on "syntax" (how it is written on the release) or "semantics" (what it means)?
There are things to be said for both: there are releases where the person designing the sleeve or label made an error, for example: releases with "BIEN" instead of "BIEM". Writing it down as on the release would make it easier to discover ("all releases with rights society 'BIEN'", if Discogs would finally make such searches possible) but it could possibly also obscure the real meaning of the field: I wouldn't want to have to search for all different spellings of "BIEM" separately.
On the other hand: not having this information as on the release makes it hard to distinguish certain releases. A good example is the Spanish edition of "Maiden Japan". There are a few releases that are very close. Two of them are nearly identical, except the spelling of the rights society: one has "SGAE", the other "S.G.A.E." (both can currently be found on a single release page, but I don't know for how long. Click through the images to see the label variants). For those releases, with very small changes, having the information "as written on release" is essential.
Of course, these do not have to exclude eachother and in another part of Discogs it is already standard to have information as written on the release (syntax) and what it means (semantics), namely the "Artist Name Variation" or "ANV". In the ANV fields it is possible to add aliases for artists, while the release will be assigned to the artist's real name and will show up on the artist's profile page. This system works well, so why not repeat it for other data fields?
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