MusicBrainz Contributor

Contributors to Musicbrainz

The term contributor refers to users being active in different areas of MusicBrainz: editing data, voting on edits, developing, maintaining and editing the Wiki, discussing on the mailing list and many more - mostly it just refers to editors and voters. A contribution then is an edit or vote.

Please note: in music terms, 'contributor' also can refer to musicians or people taking part in a music project.

Contributor Privileges

You can attain certain privileges by being accepted and trusted by contributors, who already have these privileges. The exact mechanisms of election vary. The types of privileges are:

User types

• AutoEditors are users who can apply certain EditTypes automatically (AutoEdit), that is they don't go to vote. New AutoEditors are elected by other AutoEditors after an AutoEditorElection.
• RelationshipEditors can edit the AdvancedRelationshipType tree and AdvancedRelationshipAttributes. This privilege is granted by Server admins upon request and based on trust and merit.

Style

• The StyleCouncil discusses OpenStyleIssues and (usually) solves them. Note that the council currently is in a restructuring process. But the structure looks a bit like this:
  • Everybody can become a member of the StyleCouncil by subscribing to the StyleMailingList. Your voice will be heard if you have something substantial to say, and/or if you have gained trust or merit in other areas.
  • The council has a StyleSecretary, who oversees the discussion process, but has no ruing power. As of June 2006 DonRedman is the StyleSecretary.
  • The council has an Evil Overlord ;-) , who will cast rulings, if the council cannot reach consensus. The Overlord does, however, not interfere into the discussions unless he is called upon. RobertKaye is our Evil Overlord.

Wiki

• WikiZens are the people who take care of the wiki (and hopefully have attained Wiki-Zen). Everybody can become a WikiZen, just start editing, you cannot break anything.
• Wiki administrators can delete and rename pages. We restrict this, because you must never rename WikiDocsPages. Otherwise deletion is not an issue, it can be reverted as any change in the wiki. Members of this group can put other users on the list in a very informal process.
• Members of the MoinPagesEditorGroup can edit MoinMoin sytem pages. These are people who really understand what it means to edit system pages.
• Members of the AdminGroup are allowed to do everything on the wiki. They can also break things easily. Usually admin rights are granted to allow people to edit AccessControlLists. This is mostly needed for WikiDocs.

WikiDocs

• TransclusionEditors are the people who have the permission to change the version of the transcluded WikiDocs documents.

Community

The community is self-regulating in most cases. There are no ranks in the MusicBrainzForums yet, such as operators on IRC. You can have an account to write on the BrainzBlog (Community Weblog) though.

Development

MusicBrainz used to use Sourceforge, but has now entirely built its own development infrastructure:

• I need help to fill out this section. What are the roles? What privileges do they grant? How do they get assigned? --DonRedman On the BugTracker developers can be * normal users * something in between (BugTriaging) * developers On the Subversion repository developers can have * read access (everybody has that, and IIRC it is anonymous) * write access (only very few people have that. Can they be listed? Some people have space on the musicbrainz.org server ...