Except…it’s not free, or even close to free. Building a crowdsourcing system for metadata corrections/additions is a huge project. As is moderating and maintaining it and keeping it productive.
There’s also the risk factor–I don’t think this effort would actually succeed. Large open crowdsourcing projects like Discogs and Musicbrainz have failed to capture this data despite being available to much larger communities of enthusiasts editors than we could hope to assemble here. Why will we succeed where they have failed when we have a much smaller set of potential editors?
Finally, as you’ve noted–amongst our user base, there is a certain capacity and interest in helping us with crowd-sourcing projects. This too is a resource–is this particular problem the best and most efficient use of that resource? That is worth separate thought.
There’s no clear statement about how roon actually imports musicbrainz data (and what get’s used and what not) and from what I’ve read it’s a work in progress.
This is accurate. I don’t see a lot of use in documenting what the current code does because it is being worked on/expanded. I would like data entry into Musicbrainz to be an easier-to-recommend solution for people who want to add new albums to our systems.
Musicbrainz actually has a pretty well designed schema and disciplined set of editorial standards (unlike, say, Discogs). It is a good place for collecting this information. Unfortunately, the library of content represented there is fairly small.