Wikidata:Property proposal/Covered by

covered by

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Creative_work

   Withdrawn

Description	cover artist for a musical work
Data type	Item
Domain	composed musical work (Q207628)
Example 1	Twist and Shout (Q786778) -> The Beatles (Q1299)
Example 2	Scarborough Fair (Q1053575) -> Simon & Garfunkel (Q484918)
Example 3	Hallelujah (Q969635) -> Alexandra Burke (Q234161), Jeff Buckley (Q215855)

Motivation

Well, there are many singles and songs on Wikidata. However, the only option to add an artist to a song is with Property performer (P175). Many songs are actually known by the cover artist which made a song famous. Incorrectly, many songs The Beatles covered have a Performer Property set to them. Adding a Cover artist property will let people know that the song was not originally performed by them. I don't know if this property request will improve Wikidata, but I would like to use to know how to classify songs better.

Germartin1 (talk) 19:56, 3 August 2018 (UTC)

Discussion

 Comment This is different from cover art by (P736) (which describes the person who created the cover as in art), This property "covered by" refers to someone who "played" or "recorded" a cover version of this song Germartin1 (talk) 12:54, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

•  Comment I think a better way to do this might be to create a new distinct item for the cover version, linked back to the original song by edition or translation of (P629) / has edition or translation (P747) That is how one would do it for different versions of books. Details of personnel, release dates, record labels etc etc can then all be added to the new daughter item. Jheald (talk) 17:12, 6 August 2018 (UTC)
  •  Comment I have considered this as well, but it is not done by Wikipedia (In the tracklist of Albums songs are linked to other Artists) and I think it's good that one song should only have one item. Germartin1 (talk) 21:54, 7 August 2018 (UTC)

•  Comment One thing to keep in mind is that the concept of "cover" does not apply to all music. It'd be very strange to call someone else recorded a classical piece, or a folk one, a "cover", since that's basically the intention of such compositions. It does, though, apply to most popular music of the 20th and 21st centuries. While I would generally be partial to creating different items for different recordings (after all, that's how we do it at MusicBrainz (Q14005)), I've been told in the past Wikidata does not want to go into as much detail as we do (and Wikipedias definitely tend to have only one page for both the original and the cover). In that case, I think "covered by" in a composition item would work, although some sort of limitation might be desirable to avoid every popular composition being full of "covered by" statements (e.g. given Bowie's Space Oddity entry in MusicBrainz, Space Oddity (Q581952) might end up with 20+ "covered by" even if you only allow artists who would be notable enough for Wikidata otherwise).--Reosarevok (talk) 17:35, 6 August 2018 (UTC)
  •  Comment Thanks for your response, well I think a "covered by" Property should only used for artists which recorded a song (not just played it once in a live performance). I do understand that it might result in having many values, but I think this will be interesting for queries (i.e. to know which is most covered song). Look at Stand by me (which has many notable cover artists) or Scarborough Fair which currently has Simon & Garfunkel as Performer listed although they didn't perform it first (but they made it famous). In that sense wouldn't it be possible to add important cover artists into the Perfomer Property, with a qualifier of some kind, since the "lyrics" and "writer" property already describes the origin of a song. What do you think?
• @Jc86035, Valentina.Anitnelav: Thoughts on this? I fully agree with James that we should be creating distinct items for distinct versions of a song (hence why we have properties like ISRC (P1243) and MusicBrainz recording ID (P4404), the latter of which I proposed when also considering the issue of covers). This property might be better converted, in that case, to link to versions of a song from an item about the song itself. Mahir256 (talk) 14:26, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

  @Mahir256: Maybe modified version of (P5059) would be more fitting (recording or performance of (P2550) doesn't really work if the canonical version of the song is the recording of the song itself). I  Oppose this property proposal, primarily because each version/recording of a song is a separate entity with its own release history and credits and chart positions, and creating new items for covers (and re-recordings, singles and other releases) should be considered as structurally necessary for Wikidata:Notability. Jc86035 (talk) 14:46, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

  @Jc86035: Why would the canonical version be a recording? A pop song is a composition, same as any classical work is a composition. I'd expect any recordings to point to a canonical composition item --Reosarevok (talk) 10:27, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

  @Reosarevok: Having written more in the project chat thread, I think the item for the recording/track/audio file would usually be the same item as the song/composition in popular music, especially if the song has one or more producers credited. Jc86035 (talk) 10:46, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

• I agree that it would be better to create new items and link them to the work/original version via modified version of (P5059) or recording or performance of (P2550). One advantage of this proposed property would be the one that it allows some kind of "lazy approach" but this is probably not reason enough. - Valentina.Anitnelav (talk) 08:13, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
•  Oppose per Jc86035 --Pasleim (talk) 08:41, 9 August 2018 (UTC)