Voting suggestions

If you’d like to help ensuring the changes made to MusicBrainz data are correct, but do not know where to start, the following suggestions should be useful. These are pre-defined edit searches; once you’re comfortable with the edit search you can refine them further or just create your own personal searches and bookmark them for your own use!

While reviewing the work of your fellow editors, always keep the Code of Conduct in mind. Almost all editors want to help, so your goal as a voter is to help them help better. This applies even more for beginners: always try to be helpful and patient with them, even if they are making mistakes, so that they’ll hopefully grow into better editors! That said, if you find an editor that seems to be vandalizing the data, you can always report them from their profile.

By default, these searches skip your own edits and edits you have already voted on (when relevant). To change that, load the search and then remove the conditions “Editor is not me” and “Voter is me and voted No vote”, respectively.

Destructive edits

Destructive edits (removals and merges) are often very hard or even impossible to revert. As such, an incorrect destructive edit that applies unnoticed can cause quite a big mess! Most are guaranteed to remain open for at least two full days even if they get three “Yes” votes, to avoid them closing too quickly, but it’s always good to get more eyes on them. Below you can find four different searches: one for all destructive edits (which might be overwhelming sometimes), one for entity merges and removals only (the edits more likely to cause a mess if they incorrectly go through), one for relationship removals only, and one for destructive changes to releases (track, medium and release label removals).

Unreviewed and potentially problematic edits

Edits that nobody have seen can always benefit from a quick check: even if you’re not familiar with the music in question, you might be able to notice that something seems wrong. Don’t forget you don’t need to vote on every edit: it’s perfectly fine to just abstain if you feel something doesn’t seem wrong but it’s also not 100% obvious that it is right without further checks.

Edits that have already received “No” votes are also ones likely to benefit from more eyes on them, to either confirm the edit is indeed incorrect or to add a dissenting opinion to the current “No” vote. Similarly, edits with both “Yes” and “No” votes are likely to benefit from more opinions to push them to one side or the other. As always, remember to be polite, even if you disagree with a voter!

Edits by beginners

Beginner editors are the ones most likely to need a friendly eye on their edits. When reviewing these, look for cases where the editor is making edits that go against the MusicBrainz guidelines, or seem otherwise wrong, and leave notes guiding the editor so that they can do better in the future. Make sure to link to the appropriate guidelines, or to relevant examples of well-entered data, and above all remember to be nice. Chances are if these users are making a terrible mess, they’re not doing it on purpose but out of confusion: MusicBrainz can be daunting for newcomers! If at all possible, fix the errors (and let the editor know that you’ve done that and that they can check the edits you made to see how it should look like) rather than voting “No” on edits, since “No” votes can be quite discouraging, especially as a new editor. If something is just so bad that there’s no fixing it and it is making the existing data worse, do vote against the edit, but make sure to explain nicely why that is needed, rather than just silently “No”-voting. For a longer overview of the attitude we’re hoping for, see this blog post about voting. Also, if a beginner is making especially good edits, you might want to let them know so they’ll feel good about it!

The filters for edits you haven’t voted on yet below will only show open edits (since you can’t vote on closed edits anyway). That said, a fair amount of edits that auto-apply might still be worth reviewing when entered by beginners, so consider checking those too!

Specific searches are provided for edits adding releases/mediums, which are probably the most complex and as such reasonably likely to have issues, plus for edits adding artists, which might include artists trying to add their own data and not doing a great job of it.

All edits

Sometimes you might want to just check all edits for some reason. If you feel like being overwhelmed by a very long list of edits is just what the doctor ordered, just check the searches below! Don’t forget you can always experiment with different edit search filters to limit the amount of edits shown a bit and make it more manageable