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.

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.

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.