History:Release Locking

• Status: This is work in progress as of Oct 2006.

Release Loking was first proposed by DanielBumke under the Name QualityAndQuantity. See also ReleaseLockingDiscussion and QualityAndQuantityDiscussion.

The funny thing about the "locking" is that it will loosen up parts of MusicBrainz. Right now MB has one strictness that it applies to all edits. With locking editors will have a way of marking the boundaries between

1. releases to which an edit is probably beneficial
2. releases to which an edit is probably harmful.

Then MB can be stricter in accepting changes to the first and looser in accepting changes to the second case, e.g. by

• accepting or rejecting an eidt after the grace period if noone has voted,
• requiring more or less yes votes to make an edit pass,
• making the grace period longer or shorter.

Since this system is new and we cannot know for shure what the consequences will be, it will just be enabled for releases whose artist has enough subscribers (what does "enough" mean? tree? more?). This way we can be sure that there are many eyes watching the releases in question. And as a byproduct it will encourage subscribers.

	many subcribers	few subscribers
release locked	strict	normal
release unlocked	loose	normal

Album Locking will be introduced in two steps:

1. First the locking mechanism will be set in place and subscribrs will be encouraged to lock releases which they believe to be relatively good (i.e. you expect more than 50% of future edits to deteriorate it). But this will have no effect on the votig system.
2. After a month or so (we will ask on the UsersMailingList, whether people are finished with locking, the voting system will use the lock-state of releases and make editing easier and harder.