The current Collaboration of the Month is Dire Straits, please give up some of your MB time to help tidy-up this artist’s discography. A list resources and things that need to be done are at this wiki page and you can discuss specific issues on this forum topic.
We are also trying to come up with a better name for the project, one that won’t cause confusion with other uses of the term “collaboration” in MusicBrainz. If you have any ideas, please voice them here.
And yet another edit that caused a little controversy:
The voting is a bit one-sided at the moment but it seems that working practice has outpaced guidelines again. The FeaturingArtistStyle has always been the bone of contention (see SG5DisasterRelief for example) – now the question is if AdvancedRelationships as a mean of crediting of what an artist has actually done on a release (in NextGenerationSchema-talk: “what it is”) are shifting the “feat.” in track titles to a role where it only credits “what it says”, that is when the artist intended to credit guest appearances prominently on the cover.
The con is that the presence or non-presence of “feat.” on covers barely expresses artist intent because it is done by cover designers and mostly the artist doesn’t have a say in the design.
I always wanted to revive this column but never found a controversial edit that was interesting enough / didn’t have too much flame notes. So, here we go:
http://musicbrainz.org/show/edit/?editid=5467441
What’s it about? Well, in short: if an artist releases a song on their website that is likely or said to appear on a release in the future, then is this a legal non-album track or not? Of course it’s also possible that it will definitely appear on a release but in another version.
So, shall we wait until the release is out and then only add it as a NAT if it’s a different version or should we just add it and later delete it if necessary (the guidelines state this)?
This is the first of (hopefully) a series of posts on interesting or dubious edits (moderations). I don’t know if I’ll be able to deliver a post on a regular basis; the word week in the title might be misleading 
Any way, I’d welcome suggestions for edits to discuss.
This first attempt was inspired by edit #4229934, an Add Album edit for artist Sesame Street. Although the edit conforms to the style guidelines, there was an objection: Sesame Street is a so called bogus artist. There simply is no person or group of people performing under that name. Since the album being added is a music release, it is a valid MusicBrainz entry and is therefore ‘allowed’ to be added, even if the album artist is a fictitious artist.
Still open for discussion is the question what a valid fictitious artist is, and what is not. Sesame Street has proven its validity; a lot of albums are released under this name. But what about the different Sesame Street characters like Kermit, Bert, Ernie, etc. and the characters from the television series South Park? It is impossible to formulate a definition and rules for artist names that capture all people, bands, orchestras, fictitious artists and special purpose artists like [unknown], [no artist] and [anon.]. The only certainty is that Three Flute Players and a Singer of the Atutu, Baule and that sort of ‘artists’ definitely do not deserve an artist entry in the database
Happy editing.
This is an excellent piece on cooperation and politeness at Wikipedia — I haven’t finished reading it yet, but for anyone who is thinking about improving MusicBrainz’s voting system, this should be considered required reading.
I for one, am finally seeing the light on Jamie Munro’s Survival of the Fittest proposal and how it should let us avoid some of the problems/issues/discussions that Wikipedia is currently encountering. I think it may be time to tackle that after I get the new tagger on solid ground.
After moderating my way into the top five moderators / top ten voters, I’ve decided to slow down my moderating, and spend more time trying to provide advice and help for new moderators.
On the Wiki, I’ve been working on a collection of pages that I hope will form the basis for Editing Guidelines that complement the current Style Guide. Where the Style Guide tells you how entries should look when they are done, the Editing Guidelines are intended to tell you the best way to get there.