Newly suspect albums
Albums flagged as suspect in the past 7 days (excluding future releases). These albums will be deleted from the site after 28 days, unless further information is received:
I noticed while correcting some of my charts that someone changed Ciccone (aka Sonic) Youth's The Whitey Album back to 1988, and not for the first time, as the release date for this album has been a bone of contention for years - at least in part because the band itself doesn't seem to know (probably because it sat on the shelf for several months) and won't make up their minds about it. As of now, AllMusic and SY's Bandcamp page say it's 1988, and Discogs and Wikipedia both say 1989, but Wikipedia's date isn't cited so that's not worth much.
The most exhaustive piece I've seen on this is a blog post on Medium by a guy named R.W. Watkins, who apparently is some sort of SY superfan. Reading it has convinced me that the release date really is January 1989, and most (if not all) of the people contending that it's sometime in 1988 are simply confused by the existence of the 1988 Whitey Album Promo. (It's easy to get confused by such things.)
As for BEA though, this may be one of the most impactful year-changes since the new feature was added, since it's in several charts here for both years, so... maybe it's time to resolve this question on a more permanent basis?
I noticed while correcting some of my charts that someone changed Ciccone (aka Sonic) Youth's The Whitey Album back to 1988, and not for the first time, as the release date for this album has been a bone of contention for years...
There are 200,000+ albums on the site and a number of these will have a year of release which is ambiguous, and there are several just in the last couple of weeks which have caused controversy. This thread will get *very* long if we start debating specific year changes here, but to address the issue as a whole, a better method is needed to referee year changes on BEA as they are also becoming problematic from an admin perspective, especially when there are strong arguments in two directions (recent/pending corrections can also be added to this conversation: How Dare You! by 10cc, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, When the Sun Goes Down by Kenny Chesney, Maiden Voyage by Miles Davis, Songs of Leonard Cohen etc).
Obviously, year changes are especially important on BEA due to their impact on decade/year charts. The focus on this general issue has led to recent improvements in reporting year change impacts directly on people's charts and this thread itself to improve visibility.
Year changes have been happening on this site ever since it started (20 years ago!), so now's a good a time as any to try and fix things. In the background, this general issue has been discussed for a little while where contentious changes have been debated, and it's a cause of frustration for everyone when people can't agree on a particular value. The sites needs to find a better way of handling it. We all want an easy system, where we don't have endless debate over the more difficult albums, so this is a proposal:
BEA will use a static 'jury' consisting of the most trusted external sources. These sources have proved the most reliable out of the millions of edits that the site has made over the past 20 years.
(All sources are independent of each other. Simple majority wins (e.g. if AllMusic and RYM agree on a value, then that's the winner). If vote tied, or not all sources have data, subjective decision by BEA required.)
This system should reduce the number of contentious albums (reducing the admin workload) & provide clear reasoning for anyone looking in. There might be cases (not sure how many) where jury is wrong (just as in real life), or perhaps jury doesn't have knowledge of the more obscure albums, but BEA would then fall back on our own sleuthing where artist's website, record label etc can also be consulted (but these would be different for each release and vary in quality/reliability).
To bring the post back on topic, if we applied the above process to the album being spoken about here (Whitey Album as a reminder because this post has deviated vastly off topic), Discogs & RYM have this as 1989, with AllMusic 1988, so it would be 1989 under that system. (Some of the albums listed a few paragraphs above would also be different to their current values on BEA, including some recent changes).
Not sure how I feel about all that (having just written it!), but there it is for anyone to provide feedback on.
There are 200,000+ albums on the site and a number of these will have a year of release which is ambiguous, and there are several just in the last couple of weeks which have caused controversy. This thread will get *very* long if we start debating specific year changes here, but to address the issue as a whole, a better method is needed to referee year changes on BEA as they are also becoming problematic from an admin perspective, especially when there are strong arguments in two directions (recent/pending corrections can also be added to this conversation: How Dare You! by 10cc, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, When the Sun Goes Down by Kenny Chesney, Maiden Voyage by Miles Davis, Songs of Leonard Cohen etc).
Obviously, year changes are especially important on BEA due to their impact on decade/year charts. The focus on this general issue has led to recent improvements in reporting year change impacts directly on people's charts and this thread itself to improve visibility.
Year changes have been happening on this site ever since it started (20 years ago!), so now's a good a time as any to try and fix things. In the background, this general issue has been discussed for a little while where contentious changes have been debated, and it's a cause of frustration for everyone when people can't agree on a particular value. The sites needs to find a better way of handling it. We all want an easy system, where we don't have endless debate over the more difficult albums, so this is a proposal:
BEA will use a static 'jury' consisting of the most trusted external sources. These sources have proved the most reliable out of the millions of edits that the site has made over the past 20 years.
(All sources are independent of each other. Simple majority wins (e.g. if AllMusic and RYM agree on a value, then that's the winner). If vote tied, or not all sources have data, subjective decision by BEA required.)
This system should reduce the number of contentious albums (reducing the admin workload) & provide clear reasoning for anyone looking in. There might be cases (not sure how many) where jury is wrong (just as in real life), or perhaps jury doesn't have knowledge of the more obscure albums, but BEA would then fall back on our own sleuthing where artist's website, record label etc can also be consulted (but these would be different for each release and vary in quality/reliability).
To bring the post back on topic, if we applied the above process to the album being spoken about here (Whitey Album as a reminder because this post has deviated vastly off topic), Discogs & RYM have this as 1989, with AllMusic 1988, so it would be 1989 under that system. (Some of the albums listed a few paragraphs above would also be different to their current values on BEA, including some recent changes).
Not sure how I feel about all that (having just written it!), but there it is for anyone to provide feedback on.
That seems like a sensible solution albummaster. Three sources, majority wins and everyone on our site agrees to abide by that (even if they still disagree). It’s the only way it can work.
Just to say, don’t envy your task in running the site and thanks for all the hard work that you put in
baystateoftheartNeil Young as a butternut squashProfile Massachusetts
Interesting idea, but I’m not sure if I agree. A few issues that immediately come to mind:
- RYM doesn’t yet support changing the primary issue of releases, and there are many hundreds of releases where the earliest release date is not the same as the primary issue. So care would be required to examine all issues.
- AllMusic frequently conflates recording date and release date, especially with older releases. It’s probably the least reliable of the three.
- Discogs is generally the most reliable, but outsourcing all data decisions to a single website would be problematic.
- When there is a primary source or other info that shows a majority of the three platforms are wrong, the policy would require BEA users to create accounts on other platforms and pursue edits there in order to make a correction on BEA. A policy that drives engagement and activity away from BEA to other sites may not be helpful to increasing traffic and active users in the long run.
This thread and the technical updates you made have both been a huge help, so my inclination would be to wait a few months to observe the impact before making policy changes as well. _________________ Join us in the canon game :) / Add me on RYM
That seems like a sensible solution albummaster. Three sources, majority wins and everyone on our site agrees to abide by that (even if they still disagree). It’s the only way it can work.
Just to say, don’t envy your task in running the site and thanks for all the hard work that you put in
Thanks Johnnyo, much appreciated. I'd personally be very relieved to be finally rid of the burden of vetting what should be factual changes and do away with the friction that these changes sometimes inadvertently cause (not enjoyable for any of us).
baystateoftheart wrote:
- RYM doesn’t yet support changing the primary issue of releases, and there are many hundreds of releases where the earliest release date is not the same as the primary issue. So care would be required to examine all issues.
- AllMusic frequently conflates recording date and release date, especially with older releases. It’s probably the least reliable of the three.
- Discogs is generally the most reliable, but outsourcing all data decisions to a single website would be problematic.
- When there is a primary source or other info that shows a majority of the three platforms are wrong, the policy would require BEA users to create accounts on other platforms and pursue edits there in order to make a correction on BEA. A policy that drives engagement and activity away from BEA to other sites may not be helpful to increasing traffic and active users in the long run.
This thread and the technical updates you made have both been a huge help, so my inclination would be to wait a few months to observe the impact before making policy changes as well.
Thanks for taking the time to provide feedback. Not sure I agree with everything you said, so I'll just expand a bit here. The more contentious albums will continue to be changed backwards and forwards for eternity if a way of mediating a final value doesn’t become part of the data moderation guidelines.
I’ve personally made over 600,000 edits to the site (& many more uncredited), plus I've moderated other people's changes nearly every day for the past 20 years (gulp), so I can speak with an equal amount of authority.
Users here are extremely accurate at making edits (which is much appreciated by all the other site users, plus myself, as it increases trust in the data on the site).
When somebody presents a data correction, somebody here (not always me) has to check and approve each one. It's an impossible situation at the moment (and a very time consuming one) to re-investigate the same albums multiple times and to weakly push away people when they have valid claims to alternate values.
Some users have more security rights than others and can overwrite/"fix" data without submitting a correction, which possibly is another issue (but users on BEA are deemed to know how the site works, with all its idiosyncrasies, once they reach a certain number of edits).
The proposed solution (outlined in a previous post) removes myself and others from the decision making (and any biases we might have towards our preferred sources), while still placing trust in the most esteemed sources (in terms of data accuracy).
Between the three of those sites, there are thousands of users (way more than here) contributing edits, with their own site policies providing oversight. Not all sites are 100% reliable, this is the whole point of using three sites and using the majority consensus. All three sites are highly trustworthy and I agree with your ranking (although disagree with your assessment of AllMusic).
No individual here (myself or others) has more insight than the collective knowledge of millions of users across three different platforms. This issue will never go away, as especially for some older albums, nobody knows for sure actual release years. Looking after this site has forced me into the (horrible) position where I’m arbitrating disputes that have no clear answers. This is why I’ve proposed the above solution, which allows the site to function without anyone here having to act as judge and jury.
A final point, the albums on this thread are just from the past few weeks, and are the tip of the iceberg bearing in mind the site has been going for nearly 20 years. This is a massive issue which needs a solution to stop us all going insane and provide more stability to people's year and decade charts.
I like the solution, though if it were me, given the current shaken-out state of music data sites... I'd make it "If Discogs disagrees with AllMusic, then we poll three other sites," and those sites would be RYM; Wikipedia (if it's available there) or Genius (if it's not); and finally BEA itself, i.e., whatever BEA's year value has been during most of the entry's existence. If there's still no clear consensus, then we post about it in the forums and if nobody here cares enough to argue about it, the mods make the call based on expediency or whatever.
As for the Whitey Album, I'm sorry to have brought it up (!). But for anyone who's interested, I found this article on Brooklyn Vegan, dated August 2020:
Quote:
The Whitey Album wasn’t released in 1989 and in addition to those Madonna covers also had a cover of Robert Palmer‘s "Addicted to Love," plus a bunch of sound experiments that play around with drum machines, hip hop and dub production, and more.
Nobody writes that an album "wasn't" released in a particular year; clearly it had been "was," but someone at Brooklyn Vegan decided to edit the article after publication, because they actually felt strongly enough about it to introduce a contextual error into an article that had already been circulated, rather than just let it go. How often do you see something like that, over something as trivial as an album release date? My guess would be "almost never."
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
Hayden
albummaster
II
MadhattanJack
baystateoftheart
