Talk:Music Review
MusicBrainz Biographies and Reviews
In Delft we discussed how to do music reviews and biographies. Our basic assumption was that a straight wiki system was not structured enough to integrate cleanly with the rest of musicbrainz. So, Johan's approach for implementing biographies follows:
- Biographies are simple multi line text forms that can be edited on web pages
- Database keeps full revisions of text
- The community gets to vote on changes to the biographies or new biographies. Changes are accepted or rejected much like the current moderation system.
My approach would be use a software package like scoop (which runs http://kuro5hin.org):
- Integrate scoop to use the existing MusicBrainz moderator logins.
- Use scoop to allow moderators to add and edit biographies and reviews.
- Create categories for artist biographies, album reviews, track reviews.
- The scoop moderation/rating system for posting reviews/biographies
- I'm not sure the scoop can be used to rate the posted reviews... That might not work too well.
Any thoughts? Ruaok
Given the enormous amount of discographical and biographical information already extant, it would be nice to have a mechanism for cleanly presenting masses of URLs and attached commentary (and maybe that's just a bunch of pages in this wiki . . .).
A wiki _concept_ will be great to create a very good biographies. But to bluntly copy the codebase of wiki.pl that seems far too much for me. Keeping wiki data inside biographies with a custom interface borrowed from the wiki concept would be the way to go, any takers:-) Johan
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Thats only where I'm starting. Here is my general approach on this topic:
1. Play around with the wiki and see what form reviews could take. At first I'd only want people like the MB visionaries to play around with this system.
2. From playing around with the system we could probably observe some interesting patterns and get some ideas on how to make this work.
3. Then once we have a grasp as to what we want to do and how we want the system to shape up, I would modify this wiki (or another wiki more suited to the task) to integrate more tightly with MB.
I really like the free-form aspects about the Wiki. I think that people could create/write some great reviews -- either based on their own data, or by cutting/pasting from other entries to create their own. Then, perhaps from user/moderator feedback and usage patterns we can determine which reviews are 'good/popular' as opposed to 'bad/unpopular'. In the integration between the the website and the wiki, could then show the more popular reviews at the top of the artist review page and the crummy ones at the bottom.
I'm also thinking about giving users the ability to place an artist/album/track anchor into a wiki page, and then the main website would be able to list these anchors in the artist pages in order to have a cross reference between the regular database and this free form wiki system.
But overall, I'm not certain yet how all this will pan out. But, let's keep the conversation going, maybe we're onto something here. :-) Ruaok
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As a user, I wouldn't want one single music review constantly edited by tens of people. I would want ten separate reviews, each by a separate author. So in this case, I don't think wiki fits in the model. Sure, an author should be able to go back and edit the reviews that they themselves posted. SethLadd
OK, Rob we are on the same track. The current approach is unstructured and usefull for experimenting with it, to get a good feel how we should make it. Indeed as Seth said an alternative model is to have several reviews and people can select their preference for 1. I personally favor a single document that has a number of contributing authors. But for strong opinions in the text, the single author approach probably works the best.
With Paul we had the same discussion on structured reviews during the 3rd summit. Do we want in MB:
artistnum, birthdate, birthplace
548448 20Dec1965 New Orleans
AND/OR
On the 20th of December in the year 1965 the great Jazz artist Billy X was born in New Orleans.
Having the database entry is what makes us different than an encyclopedia. Databases can be read by programs automatically, a great step forward for the SemanticWeb. I think we need both, were having the database entry is the easiest. Johan
You might want to check out the work that's going on at http://www.musicmoz.org Seems like there's room for collaboration there. RobLa
My 2 cents. Music reviews should be waaaay down the list. After clean data. After advanced relationships. After detailed release info and discographies and all that nice quantifiable stuff that Musicbrainz is set up to do already.
Maybe by that time MusicMoz will be so good we can just link to them and them to us.
Concentrate on what we are good at and finish one thing at a time!
AndyB
