-
Improvement
-
Resolution: Unresolved
-
Normal
-
None
-
None
-
None
-
None
As mentioned at https://community.metabrainz.org/t/big-bad-voodoo-daddy-or-americana-deluxe/701265/10, disambiguation comments are sometimes used to convey popular-but-unofficial release group names, even in cases where there are no other release groups with the same name. Some famous examples:
Right now, https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Disambiguation_Comment only discusses using disambiguation comments to distinguish between multiple entities:
Disambiguation comments are used to distinguish identically or similarly named artists, labels and other entities.
In the above examples, the comments are instead being used to make it easier for users to find the albums under the alternate names (and to prevent duplicates from being added using the alternate names). Assuming that this use of disambiguation comments is desirable, I think that it'd be helpful for the guidelines to explicitly mention it as being valid. I was considering something like the following (along with the above two examples):
Disambiguation comments can also be used to provide well-known-but-unofficial names for self-titled or untitled release groups.
Thoughts?
[STYLE-2559] Clarify using disambiguation comments for alternate release group names
Agreed re aliases being a better fit for this.
Do you think it would make sense to display these alternate-name aliases in search results and on entity pages in some cases, similar to how localized primary aliases are displayed for artists? (I personally think it would, but I'm not sure how to identify those cases.)
Aliases exist to provide alternative names, and they are also available for releases and release groups. While I'm fine with these disambiguations being used in rare cases, I'm not too sure I want to officially sanction that it should happen all the time (and if so, why stop at untitled albums, I'm sure there's albums with titles, but that are better known by some other nickname).
I kinda agree it would make sense in some cases but that's not really a primary alias, so it'd be a bit confusing to decide how to do it - and if we're going to do it rarely on a per-case basis with a new type, that's not a lot more useful than the disambiguation comment to begin with, so...