The Discography and Database Guidelines have come a long way in the last two decades! Your translations make you an integral part of Discogs’ History! Read more about the Evolution of the Database Guidelines!
Just hours after we got to 100% complete in French, I’m going to ruin it and add the next section of the Guidelines to Transifex…
Database Guidelines 5. Barcodes & Identifiers
Great news though – Database Guidelines 5. Barcodes & Identifiers is a relatively short section! It’s 43 strings, and about 1,500 words. So, perhaps not short, but certainly less daunting than the last section.
Your Translations are LIVE on Discogs!
I have started to add your translations to the Database Guidelines, so international contributors can start utilizing your translations!
As always, please feel free to ask any and all questions! You can always reach out to me (Weetzie) or post feedback or questions in the Discogs-i18n Translator Group.
And to anyone interested in helping with the Database Guidelines Translation Project: please join us!
The Discogs Database Submission Guidelines are the backbone of Discogs; the product of almost 20 years of community-driven discussion about the best way to catalog all the music in the world.
Discogs began in early 2000, as a hobby project by DJ and developer Kevin Lewandowski. He was looking for a better way to catalog his electronic music collection. The very first release Kevin added to Discogs was Stockholm by The Persuader.
In October 2000, when Keven first invited other music lovers to add to the discography, there were no Database Submission Guidelines. Kevin started by adding about 250 of his own records and CDs, and hosted Discogs on a scrap Pentium II server in his closet.
Contributors started as a small, but dedicated group. All submissions were entered into a loosely structured form which did not support credits. Kevin would then manually check each and every submission, and fix any typos and capitalization errors!
By February 2001, Discogs included 1,943 releases and 2,440 artists, but only 56 contributors. Kevin was still the top contributor, but several other contributors were closing in. At this point, there was a simple FAQ rather than Database Submission Guidelines:
Labels and releases only displayed after they were manually reviewed, edited, and approved. In 2001, Kevin gave about 10 users access to edit and approve submissions. These users were referred to as editors. So, although there weren’t Submission Guidelines for guidance, there was more manual oversight. Users could also ask questions and get feedback in the original Discogs Forums.
Later in 2001, the submission form was rewritten, and less manual oversight and editing was needed. However, data still needed approval before being added to Discogs; about 50 of the top contributors were given access to the approval form, and this was the beginning of the Moderators group.
As of 2004, there was still a distinct editors and moderators group. Editors could moderate, and also had access to process the updates submitted to labels, artists, releases.
Official Submission Guidelines
In 2004, Kevin rewrote the whole submission form again. The major change was that the underlying release data structure was much more flexible, immediately allowing multiple artists and labels per release, multiple artists per track, and multiple credits per track. Furthermore, the release history functionality was added, allowing contributors to see the previous updates on submissions.
As the discography and contributor community continued to grow, it was clear that simple FAQs weren’t enough guidance for the contributor community. A group of editors and moderators worked together to document how to properly add data to Discogs. By the end of 2004, there was a 2,272 word summary of how to use the “Add Release Form.” It’s easy to see how this document evolved into the Submission Guidelines we use today.
The Discogs community had been asking for easy tools to help with buying and selling. So the Discogs Marketplace was added in 2005. Before Marketplace tools were added, many users were simply using their Collection as a way to list items they wanted to sell! Although the Marketplace addition didn’t fundamentally change the underlying discography, it brought in more users interested in buying and selling. Many of these new users eventually contributed items to the database. As the functionality of Discogs expanded, so too did the documentation explaining how to add information to the discography.
By 2006, the Submission Guidelines were basically a condensed version of our current guidelines. The Submission Guidelines document was 7,803 words long, and included only seven sections. Here’s a snippet from the Submission Guidelines in January 2006:
Moderation And Voting
Discogs continued to grow. In January 2007, Discogs documented 793,581 releases, 668,356 artists, and 70,110 labels. However, manual moderation was starting to cause problems. In August of 2007, there were over 20,000 items in the queue awaiting moderation. This resulted in delays, duplicate submissions, and general frustration.
In March 2008, a drastic shift took place for Discogs submissions: Data was no longer subject to manual moderation. Discogs moved from a moderation system to a voting system.
‘As Discogs has grown, the submission system and user requirements have created ever more detailed and complicated submissions. With over 10,000 active submitters and less than 500 moderators, the task of moderating has become harder and more involved than before. By moving the voting to a greater percentage of the Discogs user base, and enabling a graduated voting system, we will give more people, especially those who own the release, the ability to register their opinion on the quality of the data entered into the site.’
There were many moderators who were frustrated with this change. Many feared that Discogs couldn’t maintain as high standards after this restructuring of the data quality control process. Although some moderators decided the new system wasn’t to their liking and stopped contributing, the new system ultimately helped Discogs continue to grow.
Diognes_The_Fox, currently the top-ranked contributor on Discogs, notes that this move from moderation to voting was a pivotal moment in Discogs’ history:
‘It caused something of a mass exodus. It was during that time that I decided with the playground bullies all gone, it was my time to take over and keep the fire going.’
Over the years, the guidelines grew to cover more situations, edge cases, and examples. In early 2009, there were 16 main sections to the guidelines (sections were added for general rules, title, format, release notes, images, updating an artist profile, updating a label profile, reviews, and removing a release).
Growing Guidelines
It wasn’t until April 2009 that the concept of a “master release” was added to Discogs. In the announcement about the release, a link to the new master release section of the guidelines was included. As always, it was a community effort to discuss and improve this section of the guidelines:
‘Since this is a brand new function, we may well come across examples that don’t fit the guidelines, and will need discussion and guideline updates.’
By February 2010, the Submission Guidelines were broken into 21 sections. The same 21 sections that exist in our current version of the Submission Guidelines. The exact text in each section has been modified and expanded, but the majority of guidelines haven’t changed considerably since 2010.
Submission Guidelines Localization
Almost two decades after Discogs was founded, the Discogs Database Submission Guidelines continue to evolve. We have begun to translate the Discogs Database Submission Guidelines! In order to truly support that global goal to “catalogall the music in the world,” it’s time we make the guidelines more accessible to international music-lovers.
Translations are needed in order to truly support the Discogs goal of building the biggest and most comprehensive music database in the world. And we have an excellent localization system in place to help contributors collaborate and reach translation decisions together.
We are currently adding guideline translations in French, German, and Spanish. In the future, we plan to cover more languages based on the progress in these three languages and community interest.
We hope our international contributors will join us in this next phase of the Database Guidelines evolution, and considering assisting with translations! Be part of Discogs history and learn more at localization.discogs.com.
Today marks the end of week 4 of the Database Guidelines Translation Project! We’ve slowed down a little in some languages, but we are still making progress:
French is still leading the charge at 80.4% translated. But last week’s section was a doozy, and there are still many untranslated strings in all languages:
Thank you to everyone who is continuing to contribute to this project!
I know, I know… Section 4 of the Guidelines is huge and daunting! Not to mention, that summer sunshine is starting to lure us outside more (at least in my part of the world).
With that in mind, I haven’t added a new section this week. Let’s take another week to try to catch up on Sections 1-4.
As always, please feel free to ask any and all questions! You can always reach out to me (Weetzie) or post feedback or questions in the Discogs-i18n Translator Group.
And to anyone interested in helping with the Database Guidelines Translation Project: please join us!
A big thank you to our fantastic Contributor-Translators! With your translation help, we are able to further the Discogs mission to build the biggest and most comprehensive music database in the world!
Just when we were getting close to 100% translated in French, I’ve moved the finish-line. (Sorry!) I just added the next section of the Guidelines to Transifex…
Depending on progress this week, I might hold off on adding the next section until we’ve completed this section.
I’ll also soon start adding the translations we have completed to the Full Submission Guidelines – so international contributors can start utilizing your translations.
As always, please feel free to ask any and all questions! You can always reach out to me (Weetzie) or post feedback or questions in the Discogs-i18n Translator Group.
And to anyone interested in helping with the Database Guidelines Translation Project: please join us!
The Database Guidelines occasionally change based on input from the Discogs Community. Whenever they change, we post an update in the Guidelines Changelog.
In order to keep translations up-to-date, we’ll also want to update the translations for the corresponding section.
You’ll notice that all strings that remained unchanged are still translated. But the strings that changed are now untranslated. To save time, you can always use the “Suggestions” tab, and just modify that translation according to what changed.
The good news is that the Database Guidelines have been growing and evolving for almost two decades, so changes are infrequent. But when there is a change, I’ll be sure to update the English source file on Transifex so that translations can also stay up-to-date.
Thanks to all of our Contributor-Translators for contributing your expertise to the Database Guidelines Translation Project!
Week 2 of the Database Guidelines Translation Project is complete! Last Saturday was a busy day for translations, but we’ve seen steady progress all week:
French is leading the charge at 84.8% translated:
We’ve made some solid progress, especially considering section 1 & 2 of the Database Guidelines are both over 3,000 words each. I promise, the next section isn’t quite as daunting:
Database Guidelines: Section 3
The third section of the Database Guidelines is all about the main title of a release. It’s much shorter than the previous sections. It’s 1,017 words, broken into 34 separate strings.
Thanks again to our fantastic Contributor-Translators! With your translation help, we are able to further the Discogs mission to build the biggest and most comprehensive music database in the world!
As always, please feel free to ask any and all questions! You can always reach out to me (Weetzie) or post feedback or questions in the Discogs-i18n Translator Group.
And to anyone interested in helping with the Database Guidelines Translation Project: please join us!
We’ve just completed the first week of the Database Guidelines Translation Project! As you can see we had a busy week, especially the last few days:
We started with the Database Glossary and the first section of the Database Guidelines. Each Friday, I’ll add the next section of the Database Guidelines.
My hope was that we can get to 100% translated in each language by Friday each week before I add the next section. We totally nailed that goal in French (thanks LetsBoogie)! We didn’t quite meet that goal in Spanish and German, but we certainly made some solid progress:
On top of that, last weekend was a holiday. Furthermore, some of our translators are totally new to using Transifex. Despite the hefty word-count, holiday, and the new-to-Transifex learning curve, we’ve made great progress! I’m thrilled to see that just a few hours ago the Database Glossary made it to 100% translated in Spanish, and we are making significant progress on Section 1 of the Guidelines in both German and Spanish!
So, a big thank you to our fantastic Contributor-Translators! With your translation help, we are able to further the Discogs mission to build the biggest and most comprehensive music database in the world!
That’s right, I’ve just added the second section of the Database Guidelines. It’s a whopping 3,427 words. However, you’ll notice the resource is already partially translated: 22.4% of strings are complete already! We are using Transifex’s “Translation Memory” to fill in translations that have already been translated by our community previously. You can certainly suggest different translations, but hopefully those pre-filled strings will give us a jump-start!
As always, please feel free to ask any and all questions! You can always reach out to me (Weetzie) or post feedback or questions in the Discogs-i18n Translator Group.
And to anyone interested in helping with the Database Guidelines Translation Project: please join us!
Some of you may have noticed that the Crate Diggers project within Transifex looks a little different from other Transifex projects. Why is that?
Most Discogs Transifex projects are file-based projects, but we also use “Transifex Live” for Crate Diggers. We hope to use “Transifex Live” for other projects in the future.
The “Live” projects have a cloud icon, rather than a file-folder icon:
Transifex Live allows translators to actually see most strings within the original context of the website! There are two different ways you can add translations to a Transifex Live project.
Using Transifex Live within the context of the Discogs website:
Transifex Live lets you translate Discogs in context and get an immediate preview of how the translations will look on the site. Navigate to the project’s associated website and then add this text to the end of the URL:
Our international community has been asking for localized guidelines for ages! In the past, we’ve been hesitant to translate the Database Guidelines. Because even in English, the exact interpretation of certain Guidelines is often debated. Once you add localized versions of the Database Guidelines, you open up even more room for debate and confusion.
But it’s time to finally take that step! In order to truly support the Discogs goal of building the “biggest and most comprehensive music database” in the world, translations are needed. To fully document non-English music, the Database Guidelines need to be more accessible to music-lovers around the world.
The Database Guidelines have always been a community built project, and we are now looking to Contributor experts in our community to help translate this knowledge. If you are interested, please review this information about Translating the Database Guidelines.
