Main Page

Welcome to the MusicBrainz Wiki!

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 Important Notice: We ported the wiki to a MoinMoin wiki-engine. See MoinMoinWikiSyntax for changes to the old UseMod syntax. Also you will have to register again with your old WikiName. 

Why

We're making the move because MoinMoin has various features that will allow us to integrate the editable wiki into the documentation on the main site. Indeed, the plan is that virtually all of the static documentation will be replaced by a read-only shadow of selected pages from the wiki. This will present the useful information from the wiki in a user-friendly form. See WikiDocs for details.

Changes

Wiki users will notice some changes when we start using MoinMoin. There are some differences in markup syntax these are explained on the page MoinMoinWikiSyntax .

MoinMoin is also stricter about the syntax that is allowed. For one thing, links or images are not allowed in titles. Unfortunately, we're currently doing this on a lot of pages.

Please Help!

Pages with syntax that MoinMoin doesn't allow have to be tidied up by hand, but the WikiMigration script does help. All pages that need manual fix-up link to the WikiMigrationBotReport page. Thus following the backlinks from this page (by clicking on the title) will give a list of pages that need work. There are about 160 of such pages that need manual fixing. Compare this to 63 people that registered themselves with apage, this means that if only half of us clean up five pages, then the new wiki will be in perfect shape in a very short time.

Please take some time and fix a few pages. The first thing you should do is register yourself with your old WikiName. This will allow MoinMoin to do backups of your changes and better resolve edit conflicts (if more than one person is working on a page).

Other than the syntax difference, the wiki should be treated the same as before - it's a resource for everyone to edit. If there's something in the documentation you don't understand, please add your question to the relevant page. If you see a question to which you know the answer, go ahead and answer it! If all the experienced MusicBrainz users spend a few minutes working on the wiki now and again, we'll quickly have some amazing documentation.

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The MusicBrainzWiki is a dynamic and growing information resource to help you understand MusicBrainz, learn how to use it and contribute to it more effectively, and to help shape the direction it takes into the future. It complements the other MusicBrainzForums, being used for collaboration on detailed and specific discussions about MusicBrainz and documentation of the MusicBrainz community, conventions, interfaces, and internals.

This page is a summary outline of thematic clusters for these documentation efforts and discussions:

• Introductory Material to MusicBrainz
• FrequentlyAskedQuestions
• MusicBrainzGuidelines
• AdditionalMetadata and information
• MusicBrainzDevelopment
• MusicBrainzDocumentation
• StatusOfThisWiki

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Introduction to MusicBrainz

New users can find an introduction to MusicBrainz in this Wiki, as well as ModerationPhilosophy, an explanation of the MusicBrainzTagger, HowMusicBrainzWorks, HowToContributeToMusicBrainz, and MusicBrainzPress information.

Frequently Asked Questions

The FrequentlyAskedQuestions might provide answers to questions that are not answered in the general FAQ on the main site. These FrequentlyAskedQuestions in the Wiki are maintained by the MusicBrainz community and are more up to date than the official pages.

MusicBrainz Guidelines

This Wiki contains all important MusicBrainzGuidelines, which address issues for new and expert users on how to add to and improve the MusicBrainz database.

• The StyleGuidelines have information on how the data in MusicBrainz should be formatted and organized, including OfficialStyleGuidelines, CapitalizationStandard and ClassicalStyleGuide.
• The EditingGuidelines provide InformationOnEditing and suggestions on the most effective ways to add new data and correct data that has errors or doesn't follow the StyleGuidelines.

The MailingList archives also hold many discussions and informal agreements on formatting entries.

Additional Metadata and Information

The MusicBrainz database can only hold some types of information; this Wiki can be used for AdditionalMetadata that is helpful when editing or voting, such as information on IdenticallyNamedArtists, and lists of artists & albums that are NotDuplicateArtists and NotDuplicateAlbums. There is also information on InternationalArtists.

Now that the database supports ArtistAnnotations and AlbumAnnotations, some of this information can and should be moved to the database; for example, the ArtistDiscography information.

MusicBrainz Development

MusicBrainz is being developed in small evolutionary steps and this Wiki provides an important resource for this process. The section MusicBrainzDevelopment lists work depending on its status:

• NewFeatureSuggestions are just that suggestions. This is the place to add cool feature ideas (or even better, discuss them on the MailingList).
• FutureWork are features we have agreed to implement, but nobody is working on it yet.
• CurrentWork is work that somebody is working on now, possibly on one of the TestServers.
• FinishedWork is well, finished.
• DormantWork is um, not finished because of different reasons.

MusicBrainz Documentation

The MusicBrainzDocumentation is a major current project on the Wiki. We have started RestructuringTheDocumentation; i.e. to move the MusicBrainzDocumentation from the main pages into the Wiki. The docs on the main pages are often quite dated, so we will try to update and intertwingle them here. This will finally lead to WikiDocs, a homepage that is completely based on the MusicBrainzWiki

The intertwingling is quite awful currently. It should be something like this: (--DonRedman)

• RestructuringTheDocumentation -- about the project, can also help with backlinks if you say "We are RestructuringTheDocumentation here" on doc pages.
• MusicBrainzDocumentation -- an index of everything there is. No matter what the current status is.
• -- should replace 'OriginalVersion' which is a terribly BadWikiName
• OfficialDocumentation -- currently does what RestructuringTheDocumentation should do. The full WikiName of this page should be OfficialMusicBrainzDocumentation BTW.

Status of This Wiki

This wiki is a permanent WIP (work in progress). The project to RestructureTheWiki is largely complete and we are now RestructuringTheDocumentation. There is information on the StatusOfThisWiki to tell you which parts are stable and which are "in progress."

When editing this wiki please stick to GoodWikiStyle. You can also use the SandBox if you just want to test something like the TextFormattingRules.