Jimmy Wales wrote:
I'm not sure that I agree 100% with everything, but I do think Erik has said a lot of wise things here.
Some thoughts:
- FreeDB contains many duplicate or near-duplicate entries. It's
designed around the ability to have a software program on my computer "magically" recognize what CD I just put into the computer, in order to show the album track names. There are many slight variations on CD's, apparently, so the same "album" (in a sense) will often appear multiple times in their listings.
- Even if that problem were solved by sticking to unique artist/title
combinations, the data is of limited value for our purposes. If there ever did arise a big clamor for that sort of thing, we could probably serve that interest better by setting up a software engine to allow people to easily include FreeDB links into articles. I'm thinking of something like an 'album:' namespace that interfaces realtime into the freedb listings, without actually importing them as wiki-text.
I'm not advising that we do that, I'm just saying that it would be a heck of a lot better than free-texting data that's already formatted by someone else.
- Make another policy that pages about bands should *not* contain
links to the individual albums. These links should be created on demand, not for all album titles.
I think that the first sentence is too strong, but I think the second sentence softens it nicely. Basically, I think contributors should use good judgment here -- some albums are of historical importance and will of course need an entry. Others, well, maybe, maybe not.
MusicBrainz is an established open-content project, with a mixed public domain / Creative Commons licensing policy. See http://www.musicbrainz.org/products/server/download.html Like Wikipedia, they intend to create a non-profit corporation to act as a vehicle for the project.
I've been speaking to Ben Roeder, who has been speaking to the MusicBrainz people --- he has made the excellent suggestion that the right approach is to _cross-link_ wikipedia and MusicBrainz.
That way, Wikipedia articles can link to the MusicBrainz database, providing instant discographies and track listings without having to import them into Wikipedia, and -- more to the point -- the MusicBrainz database would link to Wikipedia as the default place for _articles_ on bands.
This seems to me to be an ideal compromise: the Wikipedia is not gunged up by music listings (in particular, people are dissuaded from data-dumping MusicBrainz/FreeDB into Wikipedia), and both sites gain from more traffic and contributors.
See also: * http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think14.html
-- Neil