Topic: Alias / Performance Name
Is the performance Name relationship still needed after NGS? It seems like all performance names could be put directly into an artist Alias, with whatever extra info.
Re: Alias / Performance Name
Most people would say that, if anything, all legal names could be put as aliases for the performance names except the ones that have two or more performance names. And in those cases, most of the times we want to keep them separate anyway since they represent different projects.
Re: Alias / Performance Name
I see it as all things can be held under the actual name, but separated by artist alias. It would allow the data of the aliases and person to be in a single location, and allows people to use a script to have the real name/latest alias as artist credit if they want. Rather than 3 or more pages that may or may not be linked together.
All of the accurate or inaccurate information could if edited correctly be held in the alias page area.
Example
Real Name
John Doe
Album 1
Alias 1
Doe Man
Album 2
Alias 2
John the Doe
Album 3
Re: Alias / Performance Name
Personally, I'd rather have a Person level above the artist pages that kept them all together somehow (and also allowed us to avoid adding legal name artists just to link performance names together, and to link different performance names of someone we don't have a legal name for). That'd also uniquely identify people, which is pretty useful. But I think most people dislike the idea of more levels...
Re: Alias / Performance Name
Is an interesting idea, I do wonder how it would be gone about. Calling the top ID area an Entity in this case. How would an identifier for say an artist with and without aliases be made or attached?
I guess my question is, with knowing a real name it is easy to link other things to it, just as it is if you don't have a real name but know multiple performance names. Though what do you link those to? Like how would it be named/identified?
Re: Alias / Performance Name
The real identification is always the MBID anyway, so even if the legal name wasn't known, I'd have no issues using "Name 1 / Name 2" as the entity name until it was found or whatever. But I also know other people care about names more than I do :)
Re: Alias / Performance Name
I was more meaning in a search format, or when adding.
So I guess it would go like add Artist Entity which creates MBID #####, this ID acts as a archive file (rar, zip) to just hold the information linked by adding Artist Relationship Name 1 John Doe (Legal Name), Artist Relationship Name 2 Doe Man (Alias), Artist Relationship 3 John The Doe (Alias with spelling derivatives) etc? or Would all of the information just be merged into MBID ##### and the old artist pages holding this information get removed?
Either way a proposal for it sounds like something that could be helpful and allows musicbrainz to be more robust in use for persons and companies.