Talk:Q550596

The current state of "Vocaloid" on wikidata

The term "Vocaloid" is confusing, because in casual speech, a "vocaloid" can be referring to:

• the vocaloid engine
• a specific version of the vocaloid software
• a voice bank that uses the vocaloid engine (e.g. Hatsune Miku)
• a specific version of the voice bank (e.g. Hatsune Miku V4X Dark)
• the character that represents the above voice bank
• a combination of both the voice bank and the representative character, as nobody really separates the voicebank from the character in casual speech, even though there can be multiple versions of the voicebank

There was only one wikidata item for all of the above: Vocaloid (Q550596). For example, Hatsune Miku (Q552682) had statement instance of (P31) Vocaloid (Q550596), which in my opinion is wrong.

I have since created Vocaloid voicebank (Q112786431) to represent the class of vocaloid voicebanks, and Category:Vocaloids (Q112747834) to represent the class of vocaloid characters. I also have created a separate item Hatsune Miku (Q112748598) from Hatsune Miku (Q552682), to separate the voicebanks from the character. However, we rarely actually distinguish the voicebank from the character, and it is unclear to me how that should be represented. It's also not entirely clear if these distinctions are correct or useful.

The same distinctions will have to be made for Utau (Q2411621), Synthesizer V (Q102109202), CeVIO Creative Studio (Q18418876), and other similar software and their voicebanks.

As a side note, it was unclear to me if voice bank (Q15524954) (previous labelled "voice banking") represents the class of voicebanks, or the process of recording and creating a voice bank. I've assumed it is the former. Iceman1415 (talk) 06:53, 15 July 2022 (UTC)