Duplicates and Merging

I like seeing fanconcert in the wild because it's nearly impossible to predict all of the ways people will use your software. I'd like to restrict - for lack of a better word - fanconcert so the information is usable but at the same time leave it open-ended enough that people can be creative.

As if to confirm suspicions that fanconcert isn't ready for prime-time, people are adding duplicates -- especially artists. There are a few good reasons why duplicates are occuring:

1. I haven't made the Favourite Artists group clear enough and how to add artists. People are adding new duplicate artists just to add them to their favourites. I need to write something on the site help about this and steer people in the right direction.
   
2. I'm allowing duplicate artist names because they can happen in real life. fanconcert needs to prevent most duplicates, like 99.99% of them, while still allowing the valid duplicates to be added: ie. bands with the same name from different countries, or even different cities in the same country. Making duplicates harder to add might do the trick.
3. fanconcert is a new approach. People aren't used to it, the technology isn't mature. It needs more time.
   
4. I was working on other things and didn't have time to address the above issues.
   

To solve the duplicate problem I'm going to address 1 and 2 and possibly do one more thing: allow merging by administrators.

If the number of duplicates goes down, the need for merging could go away. But for now, it would be nice to be able to merge one duplicate into another, especially to preserve favourites that users have already made. It would also merge concerts, releases, etc under that artist with the other artist.

Once one artist's data is merged with another, any duplicate concerts and releases can be scored and dealt with. Hopefully I can merge duplicates quickly enough so that there won't be a lot of data on both sides. Merging will be a manual and (it seems like will have to be an) unreversable process. For that reason merging will be done carefully and can only be done by administrators (me).