Hi! I'm not sure how to reply to a thread made before I joined the list, so I'll have to start a new one. A bit of a wall-of-text, sorry!
When reading the "Data consistency policy<http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss%40archive.org/msg00814.html>" thread in the archives, I realised OL doesn't seem to have any guidelines at all, and some people were suggesting that should change. Strict rules are obviously a problem: both music and books have the tendency to find the holes in every single rule you can think of (we in MusicBrainz are quite proud our community of walking edge-case generators). But without having some idea of what's the desired state of data, it's hard to make any improvements on it. I'm the new guy here, but I also happen to be the "style leader" (that is, the guy in charge of the guideline processes) in MusicBrainz, so of course I felt the urge to try to reach a set of basic OL guidelines and documents. We have a fairly insane amount of them ( http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style ) but something much more simple should do, at least in the beginning :) I've added http://openlibrary.org/community/guidelines<http://openlibrary.org/community/guidelines?m=edit> and listed some of the issues I can, from my MB experience, see as useful to settle. I'm fairly new here, so I expect some of these are settled issues - that's much better then, but they should still be put in writing so that future editors can see them. I'm also sure other people can think of more, so we should add them there. If people think the whole thing is stupid, feel free to shout at me - if you think it's useful, let's try to advance on this. At MusicBrainz we work based on consensus - hopefully that will also be possible here but if people would prefer voting, that's also a possibility. Some of the notes are proper guideline stuff (where there is a style decision to take). Some are more of a design question, but they should still be documented (and in some cases, maybe rethinked). Of course, a good few will require coding changes and thus might be wishful thinking as of now, but it seems more reasonable to decide what we'd *want*, even if it's not yet possible with the existing code, and then find ways to accommodate until that changes. It would also help give some pointers on things to work towards for the developer(s). Cheers, Nicolás
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