Issue 3383: This is the same as “The Craigellachie Band” (Person 3014)

New issue submitted

Assigned changed to “murrough” (previously “None”)
Disposition changed to “Ignored” (previously “New”)

Indeed, but SCDDB does not really have a good way of tracking the changes of name bands may use on different CDs (let alone the membership of the bands).

I think the current general policy is to use the band name on the CD (probably ignoring minor differences).

Its not ideal, but for the moment I will leave things as they are (though I did add Ian R Muir as member of the plain Craigellachie Band).

That makes sense! Would it then make sense to add a person relationship for “is the same as”? I feel this would be a reasonably lightweight way to track this.

The “is the same as” relationship is more obvious for individuals who change their names over time, typically in a linear way, A->B-C. If the relationships are added in the right way the website presents the names as “current name” vs “see also” for previous their names.

For bands I think successive CDs by some bands may use different names but not in a clear sequence (A,B,B,A,C,etc). So that relationship may work for some but not all bands. If you check all the Craigellachie CDs and find there was a definite sequence of name change(s) then we could use “same as” for them.

NB my iTunes repository also has a “Craigellachie Trio” entry. SCDDB seems to have ignored that one.

We do have an “is the same as” relationship between Person records but traditionally this is (ab)used for individuals who change their name due to marriage/divorce/…, so it has a connotation of “before/after”. This doesn’t really apply to the Craigellachie Band case.

The way the database deals with people’s names is up for review, and what we will eventually end up with is likely to be a situation where a person’s name is removed from the Person record and instead put into a PersonName record (w.l.g). Then we will be able to associate several PersonName records with one Person record, and deal more cleanly both with the marriage/divorce case and the “band with several names” case. This does have repercussions on various other parts of the database schema (e.g., do Dance or Recording records point to Person records, or PersonName records?) and I will have to see how this impacts database performance, but basically this is what’s in the pipeline. Check https://gitlab.anselms.net/strathspey/ace4/-/issues/1 for more discussion.

I suppose another relation could be “is the canonical name of”, which for individuals could be the current name if it changed over time and for bands could be one name chosen either arbitrarily or by checking the band’s own branding. The other solutoin of PersonName sounds good too, but there will always be the need to pick a name when displaying a person’s page, won’t it? Thank you for the link to the issue, very enlightening!

In the case of the Craigellachie band, I asked Ian the other day and he said “If you see any reference to Ian Muir and the Craigellachie Band or just Craigellachie they are the same. We always advertise ourselves as the former but lots of clubs prefer advertising with just Craigellachie!” To me, this means that “Ian Muir and the Craigellachie Band” is the canonical name. This is what I have been using on MusicBrainz: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/105790531

As for the Craigellachie Trio, I also had to ask Ian whether it was just another name for the band (in a slightly different setting) or another band and he said “Oxford Connections is the only Trio recording. The Trio is not a separate entity.” I have since then merged them on MusicBrainz as well: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/105780964