Proposal talk:Unknown artist

I'd prefer artist=unknown

I'd prefer the simpler artist=unknown over the suggested artist:unknown=yes.

Since artist=* is already deprecated, artist=unknown could be unambiguous once defined per proposal.

While the proposal notes:

explicitly tagging something with artist:unknown=no might be of use in rare cases where an artist's name could be confused with a a string value denoting an unknown artist.

I don't think that rare case (of an artist actually being named "unknown") justifies the more verbose tag when tagging unknown artist in general. And I personally find artist:unknown=no to be quite confusing because of the double negation, in that case I'd prefer artist_name:note=The artist is actually named "unknown".

--Push-f (talk) 06:54, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments!

If artist=* was unused I'd agree. However, there will still be existing usage of the tag making the whole thing more complicated for data consumers. I think it would be best to keep artist=* simply as a deprecated synonym of artist_name=*.

The comment about potentially confusing names was not intended to be just about a literal unknown, but any names that contains words such as anonymous or unnamed, including languages other than English. There are a few artists and artist collectives with names of that type. Having artist:unknown=no could make it easier to exclude false positives in text-based searches for incorrectly tagged anonymous artists. I would agree that the artist_name:note=* solution suffices if search-assisted QA was not a factor. In any case, I don't think this matters too much with the current scale of artist tagging in OSM, but it could be useful in the future to have a more "machine-friendly" tagging of this situation.

I will try to clarify the proposal accordingly and also include artist_name:note=* as an option for potentially confusing names.

-- AlephNull (talk) 13:40, 27 June 2022 (UTC)

I think we could propose a mass edit to convert the remaining artist=* uses to artist_name=*. After that nothing should speak against artist=unknown as far as I am concerned. --Push-f (talk) 14:12, 27 June 2022 (UTC)