Chinese Notes

Notes on Chinese artists and releases in MusicBrainz

These are some notes about open issues and tips to editors/voters concerning the Chinese artists and releases in MusicBrainz. See also ChineseArtists and the Chinese section in TellSimilarLanguagesApart. Please contribute and comment to this page at will.

Current state

There are currently roughly 1000 proper Chinese releases in the database. The number of Chinese artists are somewhere around 300. These numbers should tell you that only the super-stars in Chinese music have fairly complete discographies, while many other well known artists have poor coverage or are missing altogether. The number of active native Chinese editors are probably below 5 and including editors with Chinese as a second language won't change that number by a lot. The language barrier is likely to be one reason why so few Chinese editors have stuck to MusicBrainz.

Inconsistent style

Punctuation and spacing

Classic Chinese uses neither punctuation nor spacing, but modern Chinese has adopted the common punctuation from Latin scripts. However, they are usually used in their full-width forms.

Half-width	,	.	?	!	:	;	(	)
Full-width	，	。	？	！	：	；	（	）

Which form is used is currently very inconsistent in the database and depends on the preference of the editor.

There is also some inconsistency how extra title information is formatted:

1. 标题（某某版） [full-width brackets]
2. 标题(某某版) [half-width brackets]
3. 标题 (某某版) [half-width brackets with leading space]

ExtraTitleInformationStyle only states that such must information must be entered in parentheses after the MainTitle, which is true of all three above formats.