Talk:Gracenote - Misplaced Pages

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POV Edits by Sooahs

I reverted the article back to the last version made by Euchiasmus. user:Sooahs, a Gracenote employee, has made large deletions which skew the article's POV to benefit the company. If there are specific factual discrepancies with the article, please discuss in the talk page. I agree with the protection of this page. Employees of the company should not edit directly, but should make comments on the discussion page. Fatandhappy 22:05, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Regardless of factual accuracy, the current article is biased in its overall structure because of emphasis. See my talk page entry above (under "Compromise") for examples from the first paragraph of POV. Sooah's first paragraph (which you reverted) was closer to NPOV than the current one, although some later paragraphs had more POV than is appropriate. Can you please explain what was POV about at least Sooah's first paragraph? By the way, why are you reverting changes, rather than trying to improve them? I understand that you feel that any contribution by a Gracenote employee is suspect, but are blanket reversions really the best response? Please take another look at "Working Towards NPOV" in Misplaced Pages:Etiquette and rethink your approach to this article. Isotropy 02:19, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for being civil, and for acknowledging Sooah's version of the article had significant POV issues. The reason I reverted the article to the the version immediately prior to Sooah's version is simply because Sooah had reverted the entire article to the version Sooah originally rewrote (in its entirety) previously. As you noted, blanket reversions are not the best response, especially by someone who may be biased, such as an employee of the company that is the subject of the article. I merely reverted to the version that others had been editing before Sooahs reverted to the October 26th version. Personally, I have tried to avoid editing the article since user:Scherf, another Gracenote employee, left me a note on my user talk page two times which I felt to be a personal attack, as well as offensive and insulting. Other, non-Gracenote employee Wikipedians may edit this article at will and remove any POV, if in fact there is any POV issue. Wholesale reversions by employees of the company are not appropriate, and this has been noted several times by a number of users. Please ask that Sooahs (and others at Gracenote) read Misplaced Pages:Etiquette and other Misplaced Pages policy pages at the office when you meet. Additionally, can you please note where any factual errors occur in the article? It would make it easier to note these errors so that others may edit to correct the discrepancies. The "structure" of the article is something evolved over a period of years and through the efforts of number of Misplaced Pages editors, viewing Gracenote from the outside - the way that Misplaced Pages funtions best. Fatandhappy 12:54, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Is it OK for Gracenote Employees to Edit ONUnicorn's Sample Page?

Because that would really improve the climate around here, and give us a way to make our point without pissing people off.Isotropy 02:31, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

That's one reason why I started it; but I didn't think anyone had paid any attention to my comment at all. ~ ONUnicorn 14:55, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I reverted Scherf's reversion to the latest Voice of All version. Scherf had reverted the entire article back to an old version posted by Sooahs. This is frustrating since a Gracenote employee (founder?) made the revisions immediately after Voice of All unprotected the page. SteveSmurf 00:08, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, this is frustrating. Just reverted the article to fix user:Scherf's revisionism which deleted most of the original article and replaced with POV a company press-release type of article. User:Scherf has been requested numerous times to point out the inaccuracies in the article, but has yet to do so. I am at a loss to identify the vandalism to which Scherf refers. Fatandhappy 15:59, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I'm not interested in a Gracenote page that has numerous factual errors, and contains gratuitous negativity. Fatandhappy can say all he/she/it wants about being civil and how blanket reversions are bad. That does not explain why Fatandhappy and others have continually reverted all text anyone adds here to correct errors in a supported way, but just doesn't happen to be negative. They are determined to keep negative text in place simply because they are detractors of Gracenote. It makes little sense for Gracenote employees to be barred from posting here when people from the opposite extreme (much more extreme in the negative than Gracenote supporters have been in the positive) are free to perpetuate negative commentary at will. I do not accept that as valid Misplaced Pages policy, and the guidelines clearly support my view. As long as people with negative POV problems continue to post here, I am obliged to do the same. To Fatandhappy: Pay all the lip service to the rules that you like, Fatandhappy, but you have consistently reverted things that were supported with links to facts, while in your comments claiming they were not. You have also reverted corrections to logical impossibilities, also while inexplicably claiming they were unsupported. I have filed a request for mediation for the Gracenote article with you listed as one of the requested participants, and you posted negative comments to the discussion in an apparent attempt to scuttle the mediation. You have shown that you cannot edit the Gracenote article in good faith, and your apparent rejection of mediation is further evidence that you are not interested in being impartial. You should recuse yourself from further editing of this page, as should Kenta and others who have engaged in negative, nonfactual editing. If you are truly impartial, how about adding links to Gracenote in all of the competitor pages you and others have injected here? And put those links at the top of the link list, instead of links to their own websites, like you have done here. Also, remove all mention of those competitors' products by name (or at all) like you have done here. How about consolidating all of the AMG pages into one page, especially the ones devoted to entire products alone? How about listing all of the legal actions they have been involved in, especially the ones they started and the ones they lost. AMG has had its share, which is how it got its reputation for shady acquisition of data. Look it up if you are really, truly interested in impartiality. And once you have done all of these things, then you will have shown your impartiality (but not necessarily your ability to deal in facts). Until then, please cut the facade you are trying to put up here in the discussion. At least I am not hiding who I am and what my goals are. Steve Scherf 02:28, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

And that is the issue. Misplaced Pages is not a free advertising service for your company. If you don;t like the criticism, tough. It has sources. If you've got an issue with that, you should be filing complaints against the websites that the statements originate from, not the people who are quoting them here to provide a balanced article. As for some bias, personally, I had no idea what gracenote was when I first came here. The article is only 'overly negative' in your biased eyes. You may find it hard to take criticism, but tough, this is an encyclopedia that provides ALL VERIFIABLE POINTS OF VIEW, not just a corporate endorsed point of view about their product. As for competitors being mentioned, the only way you could possibly be concerned about it is if it was stealing potential business away when people view the article, meaning that you are using it as an advert which Wiki is not. As an encyclopedia, we are supposed to provide links to related subjects in a 'if you found this interesting, you may also be interested in reading about' kind of fashion. The Kinslayer 10:09, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

I wouldn't give a rat's you-know-what about criticism here, if it were only factual. I have pointed out numerous inconsistencies here, but nobody seems to care. They prefer the negative "facts" over the "positive" facts, because, gee, we don't want these Gracenote people to benefit from this page... Here's a little something for you to think about. We don't care about advertising, and this is hardly the place we'd go if we wanted to advertise. The reputation of Misplaced Pages would quash any such desire anyway, even if it were something we wanted. What we DO want is something that does not spread misinformation about Gracenote, which this page does. When we have people coming to us asking, "I thought XYZ, but it says something else on Misplaced Pages", it's a problem. And as a person who seems interested in the quality and improvement of Misplaced Pages, I would think that you would be interested in fixing those things. The text you and others keep putting up, apparently only because, god forbid, my text shouldn't stand no matter what, is CHOCK FULL of errors and logical inconsistencies. For example, why, oh why, does this statement continue to persist in your edit: "commercialization of CDDB by Gracenote also caused friction with its former licensees"? I have said here at least once that this statement makes no sense, because before the commercialization of CDDB there were no licensees - how could there have been?! So how could commercializing CDDB have angered these nonexistent licensees?! Come to your senses. You are reacting emotionally to the fact that some person with a perceived POV bias is posting, and you are inexplicably willing to blindly accept obviously broken text as a result of that emotional response. USE YOUR BRAIN. I would rather not spend even a millisecond more here fighting with you people, but there seems to be nobody willing to actually check up on the factual issues here. I am perplexed why links to things that have been proven to be incomplete and misleading, such as the link to the "summarization" on Becker's page, continue to persist in your edits. I am guessing that you are not a lawyer and do not understand (or have not even bothered to read) the 7 legal documents we provided links to, but if you spend the time to understand them (or to have a lawyer explain them to you) you will see what I mean. What about the statement that large licensees like Microsoft dropped Gracenote? Where is that statement supported anywhere on the web? Did you read the Wired article linked to from the page? How about the full transcript of the Wired interview also linked to? If you had read those, you would understand that Microsoft was never a licensee, so the claim that they dropped Gracenote is totally impossible and false. Microsoft initially used third parties (who in turn used a wide variety of data sources, sometimes their own hand-entered data), not CDDB/Gracenote for its "Deluxe CD Player" product. And when they stopped supporting that application and rolled out Windows Media Player with CD lookup support, they used their own service. And in the same statement it talks about MusicMatch no longer using Gracenote. Never mind that MusicMatch is now Yahoo, and Yahoo is a Gracenote licensee; so that statement is misleading at best, because they are now, in effect, a licensee. Perhaps that statement is meant to be historical, but that's already discussed in the legal section, and they no longer exist as a company. I could go on, but as I've said before, I don't have all day and there is an error in just about every other sentence. You people are CLUELESS on this topic, and as a result are spreading misinformation in a manner unjustly harmful to Gracenote, and indirectly to Misplaced Pages as well. You may not care about the former, but you should care about the latter. Spend some time looking at the facts and see if perhaps the version supported by msooahs, myself and a few others here (whom I do not actually know) might have a bit of wisdom for you. You might also pay a bit of attention to the overall tone and impartiality, because the version you have been pushing has worse POV problems than the one I support. Look back in the discussion here a bit and you will see that the intro text we support was judged by at least one editor here to be more neutral than the one you and Fatandhappy have been pushing. Also, if you spend a little time looking way back in the edit history, you will see blanket reversions by the people you're supporting, with misleading and irrelevant comments, way before this edit war started. It didn't matter if edits were small or large, nor did it matter if they were supported with links to supporting information, they would revert it with misleading statements of "unverifiable". Fatandhappy is the king of falsely crying "unverifiable", and it's the bad faith actions of this and other editors that has led to the problems here. Before you or others cast your lot with them, why not think about what I've said here a bit first? Steve Scherf 22:01, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Controversy

I have removed the part about losing Microsoft as a customer as I could not find anything in Google searches or Google news. Please do not place it back until you have a verifiable source. While I do not know exactly why their is an edit war going on, I'm going to step in and try and help clean things up. I'm here at the request of nobody and do not favor any side. Although, adding information without sources or proof will not help you. --Simonkoldyk 22:09, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

External Links

I have removed external links to any competitor, they are fine for talking about them in the article; but, it should be kept to a minimum. See Coca-Cola and Pepsi for an example both talk about each other in article which is fine; but, no mention in external links. --Simonkoldyk 22:25, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for stepping in. Note that I just removed a link put in by one of the more controversial editors here. It was a selective link from the wayback machine that contained incorrect text that was corrected in a later version of the page. That link is at this wayback machine link, or any later page in the wayback machine. Ti Kan never released the data under the GPL, and he asked for the page to be corrected when he noticed the error. The page was corrected in 1998 about the time of the archive link above. For proof that the database was not released under the GPL, see the oldest extant version of the archive (circa 1994): The accompanying README file and The archive itself. Note that every entry has a copyright notice at the top that says (with varying year, of course):

xmcd 1.0 CD database file

Download the archive and look for yourself if you like. Also download later ones if you like, and you'll see the same thing. This is not the GNU Public License. This is a standard copyright notice. Note that the archive contains no other copyright information. So it's pretty clearly not released under the GPL, which has a very long and distinct document that must be included with the product. Lastly, as anyone with familiarity with the GPL can tell you, you cannot license data under the GPL. It only applies to source code, so the data could not have been legally GPLed, regardless. The GNU Free Documentation License might have been applicable, but it did not exist yet. One last note. Until the day Escient acquired CDDB, the database was wholly owned by Ti Kan, as can be seen in the copyright notice. There was no official CDDB organization until minutes before CDDB was legally acquired. Also, Ti Kan did not run the website, as you can see from the original wayback machine link. It was run by and copyright Steve Scherf, and any error in the text on the page is irrelevant because only Ti Kan would have had the right to release the data under some other license than the one in the database archive package. Steve Scherf 21:00, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

I have replaced the archive.org links, deleted by Scherf, to the original cddb website, and added text to explain why the gpl notice that was on the cddb website for more than a year caused confusion for many users who assumed that the whole service was free. Scherf or other Gracenote employees, please do not selectively delete inconvenient information and make excuses about this issue regarding the gpl, since freedb has been licensed under the gpl for years as well, with no issues that you discuss. Also, please note that the link to the readme file that is posted is undated and could have been changed at any time. If you would like this included, please find one that is dated. Fatandhappy 22:34, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

As the GPL was up for quite a while, it should be included in the article. Its not like it was a week or something it was a year and previous versions of that page also include that information. Although I have deleted the sentance about people being mad about it becoming a private company due to no sources. --Simonkoldyk 22:53, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Okay so I found this dated Nov 10th 1997. I'm currently looking for other sources that can verify this. Although I think the confusion should still be written in the article; but, not quite in a way to say that is was ever licensed under the GPL. Steve and Fatandhappy, I would ask that you do not edit this part unless you discuss your changes here first.--Simonkoldyk 23:06, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Okay I also found this for year 1996 and 1997; while, it does say copyright you Steve, it includes a GPL license and discusses that in the help file. --Simonkoldyk 23:20, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Simonkoldyk, please look at my text above. It has a link to the database itself. The "cddbd" link you refer to above is not the database. That is a link to the CDDB software, which is completely different. There is no dispute that it was GPLed, that's clear. Please look at the database link and you'll see that it's something entirely different. As for fatandhappy's claim that freedb has licensed the data under the GPL: you can attach whatever license you want to anything. You can tape a copy of the GPL to your pet fish and nobody's going to stop you. However, that does not mean you can actually GPL your fish by doing this. This is part of the reason why the GNU organization came up with their documentation license. So your argument is fallacious. In addition, if you simply go to the ftp.x.org page and scroll down you will see the timestamps next to the CDDB database and readme files. You cannot fake the timestamp. Are you accusing the people at ftp.x.org of changing things out and resetting the timestamps, just for me? Or are you accusing someone of somehow breaking in and changing dates on files? I find your attitude that we are somehow capable of things like this very very tiresome. And I'm getting tired of your apparent need to hurt Gracenote any way you can. But if you are determined to continue digging and digging for anything you can, at least cut the inuendo WRT dishonesty. I think it was you (forgive me if I'm mistaken) who questioned the validity of the legal documents on our website. That kind of appalling attitude is oh so tiresome and inappropriate.