I've argued in various places before that "other" is not a useful type to have. It says nothing about what the entity is, only what it is not and only what it is not at the time it was set, because as soon as we add any new types, the meaning of "other" changes. In many places we don't even have an "other" type, people are just expected to leave it blank and add an annotation if they don't think any of the existing types work. I think we should make all types work that way.

To do that, we would probably want to figure out what "other" is being used for so we can add more specific and meaningful types to replace it with, probably have a migration period and then eventually unset anything that is left so we can remove the type.

Currently we seem to have "other" for the following:

• artists (1339)
• release packaging (8143)
• release groups (29,049)
• places (838)
• cover art (13,170)

We also have "other" for medium formats (257), but there it acts as a group for all the more obscure stuff. We might want to keep it for grouping but make it unselectable instead.

Are there any others I'm missing? (I'm not counting artist gender here, that one is pretty clearly defined, I'm also ignoring instruments since those aren't editable for most people)

If we decide to do this, we should probably create separate tickets for each type so they can be discussed separately.

If we want to give people an option to pick, for those who really want to pick something when they add things, we could maybe have an option in the dropdowns which really just leaves the type unset when selected (e.g. "unknown", "not sure", "other"). "Unknown" or "not sure" might work, "other" might be confusing though if people try to change something which already has a type to "other" (aka unset).