This EditType changes the ArtistSortName for an Artist , which controls alphabetic sorting for the artist in the MusicBrainz database, and (someday) in MP3 players.

How to do it

• The Edit Artist link below the artist's name on an artist page or release page takes you to a page where you can edit the ArtistName (EditArtistNameEdit) and/or ArtistSortName (EditArtistSortnameEdit).

Guidelines

Editing

• Add Alias for Romanized sortname:

  • When an ArtistName is in a non-Roman alphabet (Cyrillic, Kanji, Hebrew, etc.) the style guidelines recommend that the sortname should be a romanized version of the artist name, and that there should also be an alias corresponding to the sortname. When changing such a romanized sortname you should consider adding an alias (AddArtistAliasEdit) corresponding to the new sortname. Such an alias should not be reversed or separate the family name with a comma.

• Guess sortname carefully:

  • The Guess Sortname button on the Edit Artist page cannot guess the sortname correctly in all cases. Use the SortNameStyle to confirm if the result should be different, and enter a ticket on the BugTracker.

Voting

• Don't assume that an edit fixing a typographical error is correct. Artists can have names that are deliberately misspelled.

• Check that the new sortname corresponds to the ArtistName (or that there is a corresponding EditArtistNameEdit change).

• Asian personal names (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) are frequently written with the family name first (e.g. Mao Tse Tung's family name is Mao, not Tung). This can lead to mistakes where a sortname is reversed when it shouldn't be.

• Spanish (and Portuguese?) personal names often have two family names (the father's and then the mother's, with no hyphen) instead of a middle name (e.g. Gabriel García Márquez's family name is García Márquez, not just Márquez). This can lead to mistakes where a sortname is incorrectly reversed (although the Guess Case button will sometimes do the right thing in these cases).

• The StyleGuidelines for sortnames are complex; and the examples given don't cover all cases; nonetheless (re)reading the guidelines may be helpful to decide if a particular change is correct.

Notes

If, at the same time, you also change the artist name to one that belongs to another artist (ignoring case differences, but not accents), that edit will be converted to a MergeArtistsEdit instead, and the EditArtistSortnameEdit change will not be entered.

Otherwise, if the only change to the sortname was case and/or accents. the change will be instantly applied (no voting required; this is an AutoEdit).

Prerequisites

An EditArtistSortnameEdit will fail due to a FailedPrerequisite if another EditArtistSortnameEdit changes the sortname.

Dependencies

An EditArtistSortnameEdit will fail due to a FailedDependency if the artist is deleted by a RemoveArtistEdit or merged into another artist by a MergeArtistsEdit.

Symbolic name and id

MOD_EDIT_ARTISTSORTNAME (2)

CategoryEditTypes Authors: @alex