It's often useful to link to MusicBrainz entities within an annotation. This can clearly be done with the standard link syntax,

[http://musicbrainz.org/artist/b972f589-fb0e-474e-b64a-803b0364fa75|Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart]

but this has a couple of drawbacks. Firstly, the links are site specific, so users browsing test.mb.org will find themselves back on the live site. Secondly, the text of the link has to be manually updated to reflect the current name of the linked entity.

I would therefore suggest the addition of a new link syntax to be available within annotations that generate will generate a link to the desired entity exactly as the links showing relationships do. The text of the link would be the entity's current name, the link would be highlighted to show pending edits, and the domain used in the link would be given by the musicbrainz installation in use. It may also be desirable to allow the link text to be overridden, whilst maintaining the other behaviour.

As relative URLs in a link get interpreted as links to locations within the MusicBrainz wiki, it seems that there is already scope for such URL rewriting. Perhaps some portion of the wiki's namespace could be reserved, permitting links like,

[musicbrainz/artist/b972f589-fb0e-474e-b64a-803b0364fa75]

to behave as described above. This syntax also lends itself well to overriding the link text e.g.:

[musicbrainz/artist/b972f589-fb0e-474e-b64a-803b0364fa75|Mozart]

The specific reason for wanting such functionality is to simplify the editing of classical music in NGS.

It is my intention to create a parent work for each 'work' in the traditional sense (e.g. opera, symphony, etc.), whose annotation then links to the works for each MusicBrainz work(e.g. movement, aria etc.). I'd imagine a similar setup might be desirable for recordings, whereby a parent recording would link to child recordings, each representing sections as cut to suit track based media.

Both of the above uses may well be obsoleted by the introduction of new relationships, in which case the links could be readily migrated to use them, but I suspect that there will always be desired types of relationships between MusicBrainz entities for which no formal relationships exist within the database, and therefore I believe that this feature will always prove useful.