Issue 1763: Correction to artist name Muriel Johnstone & Keith Smith

New issue submitted

Assigned changed to »anselm« (previously »None«)
Priority changed to »Nice to have« (previously »Normal«)
Disposition changed to »Being handled« (previously »New«)

The rules of database design require that every entity be stored in the database only once (“normalisation”). This means that if the Johnstone/Smith duo is stored as “Muriel Johnstone & Keith Smith” we can’t also store it as “Keith Smith & Muriel Johnstone”, so this issue is unfixable in the current database.

We could sort this out by including “artist as given on album” and “artist given on recording” fields in the Album and Recording objects, but whether this serves a useful purpose that outweighs the added clutter remains to be discussed. The Person object (which is also used for multi-person entities such as musical groups) already supports a “name as preferred by the entity” field, but since some of Keith’s and Muriel’s recordings say “Muriel Johnstone & Keith Smith” while others say “Keith Smith & Muriel Johnstone” this can’t be used to mitigate the issue.

I’d missed that Campbell’s Birl clearly lists them with Muriel first, so yes, you can’t have them both ways without a significant redesign of the database to reflect the way the real-world data is structured, so let’s close this one off.

Subject changed to “Correction to artist name Muriel Johnstone & Keith Smith” (previously “Correction to artist name Muriel Johnstone & Keith Smith ”)
Disposition changed to “Ignored” (previously “Being handled”)

I’m closing this as “ignored” because it has been open for a long time and we agree there’s nothing to be done about it.