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 at will!

Current state

There are roughly 1000 proper Chinese releases and somewhere around 300 ChineseArtists. Only the super-stars of Chinese music have fairly complete discographies, while many other well known artists have poor coverage or are missing completely. 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 much. The language barrier is likely to be one reason why so few Chinese editors have stuck to MusicBrainz.

Romanization systems

Wikipedia covers romanization of Chinese in great depth, but a quick summary is in order.

Hanyu Pinyin (汉语拼音) is the romanization system used in mainland China and is also an ISO standard for romanization of Mandarin Chinese. Students of Chinese will typically learn this system which probably why virtually all transliterated releases in MusicBrainz use it.

Mandarin Chinese is also the official language on Taiwan, but the official romanization system is Tongyong Pinyin. For political and historical reasons a mixture of systems are used, including Wades-Giles, MPS2 and Hanyu Pinyin. However, person names are usually based on Wade-Giles spellings, which is what you will see in the SortNames of Taiwanese artists. More details on Wikipedia.

Cantonese-speaking artists (Hong Kong, Macao, Guangdong) will typically not use any of the systems mentioned above, but rather a Cantonese Romanization. There are still more dialects of Chinese with different romanizations, so some should be taken before changing the sort names of Chinese artists with which you are not familiar.

Wikipedia's list of common Chinese surnames provides a very good overview of common family names and their romanization using different systems.

Traditional and simplified Chinese

The current text search does no conversion between traditional and simplified Chinese, which has caused many duplicate artists to be entered (can be fixed with ArtistAlias) and lookup of releases with Picard to fail if they are in the wrong script. No bugs have been filed for this issue, which would be a first step.

Tagging

The current FolksonomyTaggingSyntax is anti-internationalized in forbidding anything but alphabetic and numerical tags. Fortunately this isn't enforced technically so it's still possible to use the tagging for useful Chinese stuff that simply can't be done using the latin alphabet. Nonetheless, it would be worth changing those requirements to explicitly allow internationalized tags.

• actually the term "alphanumeric" is missleading here, as any hanzi, kana or other script can be used (see http://musicbrainz.org/show/artist/tags.html?id=36434) -- mo 13:43, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Yes, I've been tagging plenty of artists with hanzi, but users are told that "Only letters, numbers, spaces and - are allowed." I think that is a bad policy and am happy that its not enforced technically. -- foolip (HOW do I include a timestamp here? I've search for it 11 times without finding out...)
    • it isn't policy, its a glip in the wording on the site : ), please create bug ticket on bugs.musicbrainz.org and it will probably be fixed soon as its rather minor, even faster if you have an idea of what the text should be instead? I am thinking instead of saying what can be used, say what cant be used.. something like "only alphanumeric latin letters and unicode code-points for nonlatin scripts allowed, no punctuation except -"

and for the time stamp write @ SIG @ with no spaces, that fixes it, it doesn't showing the preview, but it works :) - mo 18:22, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Style issues

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 in 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.

Collaborations

FeaturingArtistStyle does not clearly state how collaborations between 3 or more artists should be formatted. The de facto standard "Artist A, Artist B & Artist C" is seldom used for Chinese artists, for various reasons. This issue has been raised on the style mailing list.