FreeDB Moderation

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Revision as of 14:43, 25 March 2009 by Murdos (talk | contribs) (moving to history + changed some links to their archive.org saves)
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Status: This Page is Glorious History!

The content of this page either is bit-rotted, or has lost its reason to exist due to some new features having been implemented in MusicBrainz, or maybe just described something that never made it in (or made it in a different way), or possibly is meant to store information and memories about our Glorious Past. We still keep this page to honor the brave editors who, during the prehistoric times (prehistoric for you, newcomer!), struggled hard to build a better present and dreamed of an even better future. We also keep it for archival purposes because possibly it still contains crazy thoughts and ideas that may be reused someday. If you're not into looking at either the past or the future, you should just disregard entirely this page content and look for an up to date documentation page elsewhere.

FreeDB Auto-Imports and the FreeDB Editor

Prior to the 2004-10-10 server update, it was possible for a release to be imported into MusicBrainz from FreeDB without any human interaction or verification. This would only happen under certain circumstances described in more detail at AutoInsertFromFreeDB. When this occurred, the editor for the AddReleaseEdit was the FreeDB editor. The FreeDB editor was just a placeholder for these edits; instead of being a real person, it represented the system operating in an automated, unattended fashion.

This feature was disabled after some mailing list discussion because the poor quality of the raw FreeDB entries and the frequency of duplicated entries due to Ticket:838 were felt to outweigh the benefits of additional data for MusicBrainz.

Note that the effect on the rate of DiscID imports could be seen clearly on the Database Stats page (the DiscID total graph).

Nonetheless, even though the automatic addition of releases was disabled, certain elements of the implementation still remain in MusicBrainz. Notably, the addition of DiscIDs to existing releases is still supported, although this occurs very rarely, since the artist name and release title must match the FreeDB entry "exactly" (subject to some case insensitivity described in AutoInsertFromFreeDB). (Since the addition of DiscIDs to a release happens automatically, without voting, the FreeDB editor is not used for these additions.)

Additionally, the MusicBrainz search page still retains special support for including or excluding the FreeDB editor, and a prefined search for FreeDB edits is still one of the entries in the SiteMenu.

  • This page is referenced from the FreeDB editor profile page; if you are moving, renaming, or redirecting this page, please (ask a MusicBrainz administrator to) update that as well.