We need another cleanup of duplicate songs and artists

[the Black Monarch]

Back in the day, the org had a little problem with people just... adding whatever the hell they wanted in terms of animes, artists, and songs, so, for example, there would be a "Dragonball Z", and a "Dragon Ball Z", and a "Dragon Ballz" etc... and the Powers That Be, having had enough of this bullshit, went on a major cleanup crusade and straightened a lot of that out.

But idiots never tire, nor do they surrender. We currently have a "The Rolling Stones" and a "ROLLING STONES". We have an "AFI", an "A.F.I.", and an "A.F.I" (without the last period). Please make the madness stop, even if only temporarily again...

[Kireblue]

We won't be doing a cleanup of the songs and artists. Due to how that info is stored, that's a much harder task to do than cleaning up the anime list, and so it's not really worth the time and effort. And although they are listed as different artists, doing a quick search for either "Rolling Stones" or "the rolling stones" will give the same search results.

[the Black Monarch]

Videos credited to "A.F.I" don't show up in a search for "AFI"

[seasons]

Definitely not a bad suggestion but, to be honest, I don't know if it's actually possible to do this.

I know that sounds ridiculous, I mean even in my mind it seems like a simple problem to fix but I don't know if it is, both because this would require sifting through thousands of artist names one by one, and just because of the way that the database architecture is structured. The first problem would be an extremely tedious matter of correcting, and as much as you can be reasonably assured that you're doing the right thing, the matter of literally changing people's AMV descriptions without their permission really crosses a line that moderators/admins have never crossed.

While I am not a webmaster/site designer, I also know that there are limits to what can actually be changed in the database without "breaking" it. Again, I know that sounds like bullshit, but there have been many suggestions like yours over the years that have not been implemented. The reason is not because they aren't good ideas. It's just because they aren't possible.

Allowing users to enter in their own AMV information was what allowed this site and its AMV database to grow as big as vast as it did. Back in the day, there was simply not enough time or manpower to screen each and every entry for accuracy. That was the tradeoff and while it's unfortunate, there was really no way around it.

[Kireblue]

Videos credited to "A.F.I" don't show up in a search for "AFI"

Searching for any individual song will return results for both. But either way, the amount of research and effort it would take to go through the list and clean up duplicates is well beyond what we're able to do. When I cleaned up the anime list in 2017, it took me over a year to finish, and the song list is currently about 20 times larger.

[the Black Monarch]

Searching for any individual song will return results for both.

That's extremely helpful for anyone who's searching for one specific song. It's less helpful for someone in strip-mining mode.

this would require sifting through thousands of artist names one by one

But either way, the amount of research and effort it would take to go through the list and clean up duplicates is well beyond what we're able to do. When I cleaned up the anime list in 2017, it took me over a year to finish, and the song list is currently about 20 times larger.

Oh wow. In that case, could we do it on an individual basis driven by user-submitted reports? Can we at least do something about "Avril Lavenge", who I assume is the lead singer of Lavenged Sevenfold?



J/k, despite being one of the autofill suggestions, there are no videos credited to Avril "Lavenge". There are, however, 96 videos credited to an "Arvil" Lavigne, 64 to Avril "Lavgine", 8 to Avril "Levean", 5 to Avril "Lavine", 3 to Avril "Laveign", and 3 videos by 3 different editors credited to "Avril Lavign (Yuck!)"

What a shame. I really wanted to see those Avril Lavenge videos.

[the Black Monarch]

This isn't even going into the misattribution problem. For example, Evangelion editors tend to falsely attribute Plumb's "Damaged" to Plummet, just because the first and most well-known Evangelion music video to use that song used Plummet's cover of it. "Hell isn't Good" from the South Park movie is often misattributed to Metallica even though James Hetfield was the only member of Metallica who had anything to do with it.

Fixing all of THAT would be a hell of a project, and I wouldn't expect you to investigate it on even a case-by-case basis.

Oh and to make things even MORE fun, there's a band named "Delirium" and another one named "Delerium". No, I don't mean that sarcastically, they're actually two different bands with separate Wikipedia articles and everything.