3 ms·
Most of this is great, but I'm calling BS on the Tchaikovsky example. Yes, there's been multiple historical spellings of his name, and to be absolutely accurate
by Tokkemon 5y ago
Most of this is great, but I'm calling BS on the Tchaikovsky example. Yes, there's been multiple historical spellings of his name, and to be absolutely accurate you would use the Cyrillic. However, the vast, vast majority of use cases should use the modern accepted spelling in English when referring to Tchaikovsky, which is what Wikipedia uses. There's a line you have to draw somewhere between accuracy and comprehension by the user and "Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky" is a pretty damn good one. The only other one I see commonly these days is the slightly more Anglicized "Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky" but that's it. Most other variants are historical or just have different editorial decisions, but they all refer back to the same guy, not a living artist who is changing his stage name all the time.
- blahedo 5y ago> ...in English... Even in English-language contexts I've seen variants of the German-style transliteration on occasion. But more importantly, the author is not restricting himself to English, and indeed the musicbrainz link gets to such a high count precisely by including other languages' transliterations. Only three are listed as English, and they're the two you mention (with/without Anglo first name) plus one that omits the middle name. Were you saying that all other languages should use "the modern accepted spelling in English", or were you just ignoring the fact that speakers of other languages (or owners of foreign-published albums) might use music databases?
- kzrdude 5y agoThe database might implicitly force a monolingual perspective on the dataset if they can't handle multiple translations of several fields. It's not an easy problem to manage, I imagine.