I'm not sure that I agree 100% with everything, but
I do think Erik
has said a lot of wise things here.
Some thoughts:
1. FreeDB contains many duplicate or near-duplicate entries. It's
designed around the ability to have a software program on my computer
"magically" recognize what CD I just put into the computer, in order
to show the album track names. There are many slight variations on
CD's, apparently, so the same "album" (in a sense) will often appear
multiple times in their listings.
2. Even if that problem were solved by sticking to unique artist/title
combinations, the data is of limited value for our purposes. If there
ever did arise a big clamor for that sort of thing, we could probably
serve that interest better by setting up a software engine to allow
people to easily include FreeDB links into articles. I'm thinking
of something like an 'album:' namespace that interfaces realtime into
the freedb listings, without actually importing them as wiki-text.
I'm not advising that we do that, I'm just saying that it would be a
heck of a lot better than free-texting data that's already formatted
by someone else.
2) Make another policy that pages about bands
should *not* contain
links to the individual albums. These links should be created on
demand, not for all album titles.
I think that the first sentence is too strong, but I think the second
sentence softens it nicely. Basically, I think contributors should
use good judgment here -- some albums are of historical importance and
will of course need an entry. Others, well, maybe, maybe not.
MusicBrainz is an established open-content project, with a mixed public
domain / Creative Commons licensing policy. See
Like Wikipedia, they intend to create a non-profit corporation to act
as a vehicle for the project.
I've been speaking to Ben Roeder, who has been speaking to the
MusicBrainz people --- he has made the excellent suggestion that the
right approach is to _cross-link_ wikipedia and MusicBrainz.
That way, Wikipedia articles can link to the MusicBrainz database,
providing instant discographies and track listings without having to
import them into Wikipedia, and -- more to the point -- the MusicBrainz
database would link to Wikipedia as the default place for _articles_ on
bands.
This seems to me to be an ideal compromise: the Wikipedia is not gunged
up by music listings (in particular, people are dissuaded from
data-dumping MusicBrainz/FreeDB into Wikipedia), and both sites gain
from more traffic and contributors.
See also:
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