Re: RFV: How to handle band/artist name changes

On 11/2/06, Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen <freso.dk@...> wrote:
> 2006/11/1, Age Bosma <agebosma@...>:
> >Arturus Magi wrote:
> >>The general proprosal, I have no problem with, but there are a lot of
> >>artists whose legal name is not their primary entry, or for whom we
> >>have a significant number of aliases and no legal name.  I have
> >>significant doubts about the usefulness of automatically assuming
> >>every existing AR points to a legal name.
> >
> >The existing AR should have only be used for this purpose since it's
> >only intend was to create a legal name relation. I think it's saver to
> >assume that most links are correct than non are.
>
> I disagree:
> Wrongly adding the "legal name" attribute to a bunch of ARs would be
> wrong information.
> Not adding the "legal name" to another bunch of ARs would be missing
> information.
> Missing information is much, much better than wrong information since
> wrong information is so hard to kill (in some cases impossible).
>
"legal name" is problematic.  People get married. People get divorced.
 Some people have more than one legal name. People change their names
legally.  People have legal names they have never and will never use.
At best we can know what someone's legal name probably was during a
particular period.

Whatever the stated intent may have been initially, the fact is that
the AR very often does not point to any specific currently legal name
at either end.  I'm not just talking about corner cases here either,
it's really very common.  Me personally, I've had 5 or 6 perfectly
legal names in my lifetime, and at some points I had two at once (I
still have, in fact :).  It's really not that unusual.  And I'm not
out there making music under performance names either :)

I agree with Freso very strongly here. Missing information can be
added, bad information can be very quite difficult to get rid of.

Regards,
--

-- 
Lauri (or someone who may be feeling like using that name, this week) Watts