MusicBrainz Forum: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 16:22, 30 November 2005

Forums for MusicBrainz Collaboration

There are many different forums for collaboration (discussion, development, editing, etc.) in the MusicBrainz community.

  • This Wiki itself, of course, is one. It has a mix of discussion and documentation ranging from the introductory to the esoteric.
  • The [[[Image:mb-shingle.gif]]] icon) have breaking news of interest to all users, and help and documentation targeted at beginning users. These also link to the most important pages, the ones for searching and editing the MusicBrainz database, which in turn contains...
  • ModerationNotes (and ArtistAnnotations and AlbumAnnotations) associated with changes to (and entries in) the database; these are well-suited for very specific discussions and documentation.
  • There are several MailingLists for discussion of MusicBrainz issues; these are ideal for active discussions (and controversies!) with a wider audience.
  • The Weblog has frequent updates from MusicBrainz developers on their progress in implementing new features and projects. While it has a comment feature for feedback, substantive discussion should be on the MailingLists or in this Wiki.
  • The SourceForge bug reporting and feature request pages are used to track problems and well-defined and self-contained ideas for enhancement that have been generally accepted, so that the work can be assigned to one of the developers and the resolution status can be tracked.
  • The IRC channel is a very informal forum for Q&A or brainstorming, with immediate interactive discussions.
  • Every once and a while there is a MusicBrainzSummit, where people meet in the real world.

This Wiki is best suited for two overlapping uses. The primary one is for intermediate and advanced documentation of the MusicBrainz community, conventions, interfaces, and internals. While there's a fair amount of this on the main pages, over time most of this should be moved to the Wiki, where it can be maintained and extended by the community as a whole. The Wiki is especially well suited for documenting community issues and conventions like the style and editing guidelines, which change over time as a result of the community's interactions, and don't necessarily require development efforts.

The second use is for detailed and specific discussions. General ideas or opinions are best discussed on the MailingList, but once it gets to the point where there are detailed proposals (and counter-proposals) it makes sense to move discussion to the Wiki, where others can comment in-line and link to related topics, as well as summarize and re-organize the discussion. Additional discussion may still take place on the MailingList or IRC and if there is general acceptance of the suggestion, it may be a good idea to create a feature request on the SourceForge tracker.


Author: @alex