Facts

Unnamed works into the wild

There is a lot of unnamed works in folk/traditional music(s). Either there is no known name at all or the recording musicians did not know the name. Both cases are frequent. For example, in Irish traditional music (ITM):

• https://thesession.org/tunes/search?q=Gan+Ainm
• https://www.irishtune.info/untitled-book.htm

This is the tip of the iceberg for ITM. The same goes for other genres. This is a mess, but we have to deal with it.

Unnamed works in MusicBrainz

Many unnamed works are already added to MusicBrainz:

• http://musicbrainz.org/search?query=gan+ainm&type=work&limit=25&method=direct
• http://musicbrainz.org/search?query=unknown&type=work&limit=50&method=indexed
• http://musicbrainz.org/search?query=untitled&type=work&limit=100&method=direct

They often occur in medleys. They sometimes carry useful information, such as composer (most of the times: [traditional]) or area. Issues are:

1. Unnamed works are named with a great variety of replacement (Gan Ainm, Untitled, No Name, Unknown, ...), most of the time related to the area it comes from. It makes difficult to search for it.
2. Unnamed works are often unduly linked to unrelated recordings. Indeed, it is not possible for a novice to distinguish an unnamed work from another, as it requires to listen at it. It ends up with clumsy relationships, gathering possibly unrelated recordings to the same work: http://musicbrainz.org/work/c3331c51-ac50-43e1-9500-a359b7055d28/edits

Proposals

At least a clear guideline should be made to avoid having an infinite number of clueless [unknown] works and to allow for legitimate unnamed works when it comes with useful information (composer, area, link to other databases, etc.). Maybe special purpose works could be helpful there, but the most important thing is IMHO to agree on a clear guideline.

P.S. I mistakenly created this issue before finishing its description, more to come another day.