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When we originally wrote the DBGs there were a lot of edge cases that we didn’t consider (or know about), so we try to revise/expand them on a pretty regular basis.
For example, our location DBGs were rather short and missing international examples and exceptions. Our concert and tour titles didn’t account for cases where tour and concert titles both exist for a concert. Lastly, we were missing something pretty important from our Band DBGs.
In our most recent updates to the DBGs, we’ve fixed these issues:
Location
Originally, the DBGs focused a lot on the United States. We’ve expanded the location DBGs with a larger international focus:
- We’ve substituted the word “state” for “first-level administrative district” and expanded our list of examples to include provinces, counties, prefectures, regions, emirates, and more!
- We’ve added a link to Wikipedia’s list of administrative divisions by country to help users find the correct location for any given venue
- We’ve drafted specific guidelines for the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and city-states.
These changes should be helpful, especially with the release of the Location Aliases for Venue feature that we recently deployed.
You can read these here: Database Guidelines for “Location Field”
Concert/Tour Titles
Originally, the database guidelines gave precedence to concert titles over tour titles. In the instance where a concert has both a concert title and a tour title, we now allow both to be included.
Additionally, we’ve slightly expanded the “Concerts Without a Tour Title or Concert Title” subsection to explain better what happens when the title field is left blank.
Lastly, we found that some users were adding a subset of multiple days of multi-day festivals, causing some issues. So we’ve prohibited these sorts of entries and better explained the users may add single days of multi-day festivals or the whole festival, depending on their preference.
You can read these here: Database Guidelines for “Concert Title or Tour Title” Field
Bands
Our DBGs for bands state, “Band names should be entered exactly as the official band name at the time of the concert…” and “All of the bands that performed should be listed on a concert.”
We felt that this implied that users should only enter the name of the band itself and not individual members, but we’ve seen this issue quite a few times.
For example, if One Direction performed a concert, the individual members (e.g. Harry Styles) should not be listed as individual bands.
To help remedy this, we’ve added clarification that explicitly states, “Do not include individual member of a band” with some additional explanation.
Additionally, we’ve added guidelines for “Performances by Holograms of Professional Musicians”.
You can read more here: Database guidelines for “Bands” Field
Conclusion (Future DBGs)
There are many more planned updates for DBGs, including additional guidelines for multi-day festivals, non-traditional concerts, and non-concert events like professional wrestling, performing arts events like plays and musicals, and many others.