Restrict editing of artist, venue and date
I think we should consider restricting changes to artists, venues and dates. While there are some valid usecases for changing one of these attributes, changing more normally indicates a different gig, hence a new setlist.
- Other date, other venue? Most likely another concert
- Other artist, oder venue? Certainly another concert
- Other date, other artist? Again, probably a different gig
Even changing one property could be restricted:
- Other date? Probably postponed or simply entered wrong. There's rarley a reason to change it by more than a few days though.
- Other aritst? Well, only makes sense for things like Dave Matthews Band instead of Dave Matthews or similar
- Other venue? Wrong venue entered or gig moved to different (often bigger) venue. Rarely a usecase to move it to another city or even country though.
I think it would make sense to introduce this restrictions to prevent vandalism.
To improve usability, the first author could still be allowed to change all properties for a few minutes/hours while nobody else edited it.
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Adminsfussenegger (Admin, setlist.fm) commented
Thanks for your comment, especially for sharing your experience here. I still think it's doable while considering all the usecases you mentioned. It's certainly not trivial (just like the last.fm issues you've linked to) and will therefore remain here for a while, waiting for further input.
To answer your question: Changes wouldn't be compared to the previous version but the original one.
Barely counting the number of changed attributes obviously isn't sufficient. There could be a system that evaluates every change (a changed artist or venue could be a 5, a changed artist with same name a 1, changed venue in same city a 2, ...) and checks whether it it's under a certain threshold.
Well, that's kind of my first and unfiltered idea to tackle the problem. I'll certainly have to think about it a little more :)
By the way, regarding duplicates we certainly should add advanced editing capabilities for regular users, i.e. not only moderators. So they can delete, merge and batch-edit setlists themselves. Everything would have to be undoable of course and users would require to gain trust before they get access to these features. This should hopefully take as further towards a high-quality and thoroughly maintained database of setlists.
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leglessmoof commented
I see wrong dates added all the time. Common mistakes include using "July" instead of "June" and vice versa. Or confusing the month/day, so October 5 becomes May 10. Both of those result in the date being wrong by more than just a few days. Also, the Last.fm import feature usually uses the wrong date when importing multi-day events.
I see wrong venues added all the time. This is especially true for festivals, since many people still put the festival name in the "Tour" field rather than the "Venue" field. The Last.fm import feature is also guilty here, it's constantly adding duplicate and incorrect venue names that need to be fixed.
I see wrong artists added all the time. And not just Dave Matthews Band vs. Dave Matthews, Jimi Hendrix vs. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, etc. Some artists have multiple entries in the database, because there are multiple bands with the same name -- Iron Maiden, Eagles, Incubus, Annihilator, etc. It's not uncommon for someone to add a setlist using the wrong artist. For example, they used "Eagles (Reggae artist)" instead of "Eagles (US country rock band)". The Last.fm import feature is also guilty of this. When it adds Annihilator setlists, it uses "Annihilator (hardcore gabber artist Scott Brown)" instead of "Annihilator (Heavy Metal Band)".
I don't think it's that uncommon for more than one of the above problems to occur on the same setlist. Under the changes proposed here, these problems couldn't be corrected. So more than likely, the incorrect setlist would just remain on the site, and someone would add a new setlist with the correct info. Then you have 2 setlists on the site, one of which is wrong, but the duplicates aren't necessarily easy to detect since the artist/date/venue is different. In my opinion, that's a bigger problem than the one we're trying to prevent (vandalism).
Also, how would you really restrict someone from changing 2 attributes? Couldn't someone just edit the setlist once to change the date, then edit it again to change the venue?
In conclusion, you'll notice I meantioned a lot of problems with the Last.fm import feature in this post. I wrote a whole separate post about problems with the Last.fm import feature, but no one seems to have noticed it. So I thought I would link to it here:
http://setlistfm.uservoice.com/forums/14938-setlist-fm-features/suggestions/983913-problems-with-last-fm-import-feature