EditTypeExample

This page is an example for the layout (and content) of the explanation pages for the various edits; it was a trial balloon for the format, but is now merely of historical interest, in order to understand some of the motivations for the style. In the future, it could be an annotated example that describes what type of information to put on these pages, with the reasons for doing so. @alex
- If that is the case, it should be moved out of the EditType category --Keschte

Edit Artist Name

This edit is used to change an artist's name throughout the entire database.

How to do it

The Edit Artist link below the artist's name on an artist or album page takes you to a page where you can edit the artist's name (EditArtistNameEdit) and/or ArtistSortName (EditArtistSortnameEdit).

Guidelines

Editing

The following shows several different ways to imitate the OfficialStyleGuide's anchor system; none of them totally satisfactory. What do you think of the various layout options here? I prefer unnumbered list with manual numbering for anchors. @alex

Using definition style allows a single bullet, but the line break between the anchor and the text is annoying.

:
- When changing an artist's name, consider also adding an alias (AddArtistAliasEdit) for the existing name. If it was used before, it will probably be used again; having an alias will help prevent the creation of a duplicate artist that needs to be merged with MergeArtistsEdit. (This is less important if only case or accents are changed, since searches will ignore both of those, nor if the edit is only adding to the artist's name, not changing what was there before.)

Unnumbered bullets make the selectable anchors look duplicated, unless you manually number the points.

2 Before changing an artist's name, consider the possibility that it is a duplicate entry for the artist. A quick artist name search may turn up a number of variants. You may wish to merge the artists instead (this is done automatically for an exact match, but it's worth checking manually because near-misses are very common).

The numbered approach is the closest to the OfficialStyleGuide, but makes it impossible to put paragraph breaks between the points or use unnumbered sub-items (the numbering is restarted at 1 if you have anything other than numbered list items).

∗ When an artist changes names, it may be better to use AddArtistEdit to create multiple artists (e.g. Jefferson Airplane which later became Jefferson Starship) rather than combine all the releases under a single artist and create an endless battle over which is the "correct" name.
1. An exception to the above is when an artist is legally required to change names to avoid confusion with another artist; in that case changing the artist name is usually the right approach.

IMO a more WikiWay to do this would be to make a page for each of these items, where the title is a whole sentence. We can duplicate the explanation of the sentence here and on the page, and the page could hold examples and discussion. This way you can refer to these pages from other places in the Wiki (e.g. from StyleGuidelines). This would make for good intertwingling. --DonRedman

Don't change an artist name for one track or album.
- Don't change the artist name because it's wrong for a single track on a Various Artists album; use ChangeTrackArtistEdit in that case. Similarly, if the artist name is wrong for an album, use MoveReleaseEdit to move the release to the correct artist.

I don't think separate pages per recommendation is what we want. I see these pages providing guidance to new editors in a form easily pasted into EditNotes, like the current style guide (I've been wanting this for many recent notes I've made). We want newbies to learn as much as possible when they follow the link; having a page with all the advice for a particular change type seems to be about the right amount that a newbie can digest in a single session. I don't think that individual pages would have enough content to link outwards significantly. As far as convenience of linking, I don't see [:DontDoStupidThings:Don't do stupid things] as being significantly easier than [http:?EditArtistName#dontdostupidthings Don't do stupid things] although the former would display without [brackets]. If a Wiki redirection page could reference an anchor, we could have the best of both, but I tried it and it doesn't work. @alex

Voting

Don't assume that an edit fixing a typographical error is correct. Artists can have names that are deliberately misspelled.
Look for a reference to an official artist home page that documents the artist's preferred name.
An artist name that has (feat.) or "featuring" probably should have been modified to agree with the Style Guide. This may also be the case for artist names with "&" or "vs." in them.

Notes

If you change the artist name to one that belongs to another artist (ignoring case differences, but not accents), the edit will be converted to a MergeArtistsEdit instead, merging this artist into the other one.

Otherwise, if the only change to the name was case and/or accents. the edit will be instantly applied (no voting required; this is an AutoEdit).

Prerequisites

An EditArtistNameEdit will fail due to a FailedPrerequisite if another EditArtistNameEdit changes the name.

Dependencies

An EditArtistNameEdit will fail due to a FailedDependency if the artist is deleted by RemoveArtistEdit or merged into another artist by MergeArtistsEdit.

Internal Errors

An EditArtistNameEdit will fail due to a NameClash if another artist is created with, or renamed to, the target name after the EditArtistNameEdit is submitted. If an artist with that name already existed, it would have been converted to MergeArtistsEdit as noted above, but in this case it is too late to be converted.

Symbolic name and id

MOD_EDIT_ARTISTNAME (1)

Having a "See also" section is very un-Wiki-like, but I'm not sure how best to immerse the links to other moderation explanation pages. @alex It is probably nicest to enter them into the explanative text above. But hey, a link under 'See also' is better than no link at all --DonRedman Since all three of these are entered in the explanative text, I think this section could be dropped @alex

Should we make things like ArtistName WikiLinks as well? And can anyone think of a good category for pages like these? Something like CategoryMusicBrainzExplanation? --DonRedman Perhaps we could use CategoryTerminology for ArtistName, ArtistSortName, DiscID, etc. @alex

Since there will be over twenty of these pages when they're all written, they should probably get their own Category; I used Edit Types below to try to avoid BadTerminology. @alex

CategoryDiscussion CategoryWiki CategoryEditTypes