idk, for situations such as http://musicbrainz.org/edit/7093996 it can still be useful (iirc I had a few of this manner.)

info could be copied over to track annotations though.

All schema change tickets will be scheduled separately from normal scheduling cycles, so I am removing these from scheduling.ocharles.org.uk.

http://chatlogs.musicbrainz.org/musicbrainz-devel/2012/2012-03/2012-03-26.html#T19-36-54-3898

I agree with Zaphod. There are definitely occurrences where having a description for an URL are useful.

We have a very small number of descriptions in the DB compared to the number of URLS (~28k versus over a million), and the vast majority of them are reiterations of ARs (official homepage for <artist>, wikipedia page for <artist>, 'homepage by a fan' (i.e. fan page), 'ASIN', unendingly many 'Discogs', etc.), irrelevant stuff ('.' for example, from when descriptions were required, and I'm also seeing a bunch of long numbers that don't mean anything), things that belong in annotations or other parts of releases/recordings/etc. ("11-track Japanese re-issue of Argo Cadet release, marketed by Universal Classics and Jazz", catalog numbers, barcodes, etc.), etc.

We have a lot of worthless noise in this field; I'd like to hear something that's useful to have a URL description for that can't just be put in a related entity's annotation to substantially better use; without that I think we should go forward with this (possibly even just in October, which also makes MBS-4747 a straightforward fix).

http://mbsandbox.org/~ianmcorvidae/url-descriptions.txt is a list of everything that's not null or the empty string (yes, the start there is all the ones that just have a single space).

oh, I forgot all of the ones that are just the URL being added. Because having it in both the url field and the description was apparently a good idea.

Moving to decision required as there is opposition for this ticket.

we've agreed to go ahead with this and drop descriptions from URLs. When the descriptions are useful, the information should be conveyed in an annotation.

Most of the descriptions I added on URLs have been useless - and at the time it was not publicly visible yet required, it was just random dirty words (nikki cleaned them up, though).

The only useful ones I added were about the language of the website, i.e. "en", "fr", etc.

http://codereview.musicbrainz.org/r/2315/ includes the schema change scripts; more work will of course follow.

The above-linked review should now be complete.

This has been merged to the schema change branch, but as it requires proper database testing it can't really go into beta testing... I'm closing this for now until we decide on testing strategies.