Philip Jägenstedt wrote: > Consistency is, IMHO, one of the most valuable aspects of the MB > database, and I do not see why this issue should be treated any > differently from similar issues like capitalization, abbreviations, > etc. In these areas you will find diversity in the wild, but we still > have style guidelines.
There are also plenty of (much more common) things we don't standardise though and yet they're not seen as a big problem. I don't see any particular *need* to standardise this. It affects a tiny amount of data edited by a tiny number of people and neither style appears to be incorrect anyway. > Practically, if you and I look at the same cover scan and have > different preferences, in 20% of the cases we will disagree if there > is a space there or not. How should such editing conflicts be > resolved? That > <http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/User:jesus2099/Style/Language/Vietnamese#Examples> > tries to distinguish between 3 different forms (no, narrow and full > space) only makes this problem worse. I agree that trying to distinguish between three different forms is problematic (e.g. I don't agree that the space in the second example is narrow). There are however cases where I think we would all agree there is a space on the cover. For cases where it's debatable, we have a voting system. > If deemed necessary, I can ask my wife (currently in Hanoi) to contact > the ministry of education and ask what style is considered correct in > higher education. It's possible that they don't know or care, of > course. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to check what style > they use on their website <http://www.moet.gov.vn/>. Although I suspect the answer is that they don't know or care, I would certainly be interested in knowing what they have to say about it, if she'd be willing to ask. > At this point I hope that our style leader will interrupt us. Tristan > and I have debated this for over 3 years and still don't agree, so > this issue will clearly not be resolved by us alone. Style leader*s*. There's still two of us. ;) My summary: There are two people who currently care about the problem. One prefers spaces before the punctuation in question. One prefers no spaces before the punctuation in question. There are very few people editing Vietnamese in general. There are no known native Vietnamese speakers editing (if there are, I don't know who they are :)). There appears to be no official style. Both styles are found both in print and online. We do not know why both styles are used (whether it's generational, regional or simply personal preference). The proportions vary depending on the material being looked at, but the no space style seems to be more common. Both styles are (unsurprisingly) found on CD covers. The number of Vietnamese releases in general is still rather low. The number of releases this affects is tiny (~30). My conclusions: There are not enough people who care to come to a majority decision about which way to standardise it. There are not enough people who care about the issue to maintain the data according to such a guideline anyway. There is not enough data affected to make standardisation particularly useful right now. Therefore I think the best choice right now is a compromise, i.e. to allow both forms, which is effectively what this proposal is. If the authorities in Vietnam ever publish an official style (something which explicitly talks about how to write punctuation) or if we ever have a community of Vietnamese editors who care about which style should be used, then that would be a better time to revisit it. Nikki _______________________________________________ MusicBrainz-style mailing list MusicBrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
