Why Wiki Sucks

[koganbot]

Tom Ewing (You Don't Have To Be A Mentalist To Edit Wikipedia, But It Helps): this is one of the awesome things about Wikipedia - the fact that it's a project which has yoked a lot of individual bads (egocentricity and pedantry) into a gigantic collective good. Wikipedia is unique in that it's a community that actually works better the more nit-pickety and humourless its members are! God bless it.

For music, Wiki is indispensable* when it comes to chart placement of a song, what band the lead singer previously belonged to, when she was born, and so forth, but for anything having to do with what the music is like or why anyone would ever care, Wiki is beyond worthless. The most useful nondiscography items I ever saw on Wiki were the various catty things that the Cheetah Girls were rumored to have said about one another, and of course those were removed, presumably for not adhering to Wiki's communal iron-butt standards. By the way, some of the lit and philosophy entries manage to avoid equivalent defects, when they somehow evade the stricture to back everything up with a reference and the insistence that no one engage in original research or thought. (See this write-up on John Wyndham: it's not a collation of received opinion but rather someone's concise analysis of the work, its theme, its method, the entry presumably written by a single individual who read the work and used his or her mind.)

*Allmusic.com takes longer to load, makes you go through too many clicks, gives you too many irrelevant choices with its search engine, and only gives you U.S. data. But its writers will often tell you something interesting about the music, which Wiki almost never manages. I've looked at Discogs a couple of times and it's a mess, too many search results that cover not enough music.

Comments

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

For music, Wiki is indispensable* when it comes to chart placement of a song, what band the lead singer previously belonged to, when she was born, and so forth, but for anything having to do with what the music is like or why anyone would ever care, Wiki is beyond worthless.

But...but...that isn't Wiki's job! That's the job of reviews, and forums, and fan sites, and MySpaces! Why anyone would (a) look to Wiki for that sort of information, or (b) want to be able to is beyond me. Wikipedia is not built to handle the discussions and mythologies and friendships and interactions that are encompassed by the phrase "why anyone would ever care."

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I also wonder how much of that stuff you could get by looking at the edit histories and discussion pages, too!

[koganbot]

Of course it's Wiki's job, just as it's Wiki's job to say what happened at the Battle of the Alamo and why that had an impact on subsequent events (i.e., why anyone would care). And Wiki will do that job for the Alamo (and I presume they do that job for Nietzsche, though I haven't read the entry; the Enclyclopedia of Philosophy thought enough of Nietzsche that they actually said what some of Nietzsche's ideas were, rather than merely giving the publication dates of his books and the number of copies sold).

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

But the impact the Battle of the Alamo is relatively simple: the battle had x outcome, which led to y group moving into z territory, which led to the next battle. And while various historians probably competing theories as to why x outcome led to y group moving into z territory, or whether it was really important that it happened precisely that way, if you ask a group of historians what the impact of the Battle of the Alamo was, you will probably not get answers as varied and personal and contentious as you will if you ask "Why should I care about this album?"

You and I have very similar opinions on Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography, yet if someone asked us, "Why should I care about Autobiography> What is so interesting about it?" we would give them very, very different answers. Dave's answer would be equally different, and a non-fan's answer would probably be "You shouldn't, and nothing."

Because "Why should I care about about the Battle of the Alamo?" and "Why should I care about this album?" are two very different questions. One wants to know why you should care -- why the battle was tactically significant, where it fit in to the big picture of the war. The other wants to know why you should care -- why you should love it.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the "they" in wikipedia includes all of us frank -- if the stuff that ought to be there isn't there, the person you're complaining not putting it there is basically you yourself

[koganbot]

Yes, I got this the first time you said it, and it's wrong.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Well yes, I guess I wanted to find out how and why you think it's wrong -- who's blocking the Wyndham effect in the pop entries? It makes no sense to just say "them", meaning the people who devoted their lives to wiki-making, because nothing is stopping "us" adding ourselves to this crew (unless there IS something stopping us which I don't know about and you do but aren't telling).

[koganbot]

Too late, the weight of both wiki practice and wiki policy is against it, to mobilize a critical mass of "us" i.e. potential new wiki editors/writers to change the practice is highly improbable because it would require expending 100 times the effort on wiki that we expended on ilX (which most were willing to let go down in 2005 and 2006), and few would think either the chance of success great enough or the issue important enough to be worth the effort (the opposite would require people like girlboymusic, katstevens, and me to both be outraged by current wiki and to think it would be rewarding and fun to expend a vast amount of energy fighting against dullards and idiots in order to change it). I don't have that much knowledge of current wiki folkways and constituency and may be underestimating the receptivity, but I do know "us."

This doesn't mean that anything with the wiki idea and ideals is doomed to mediocrity in its music coverage. I'm just gauging the current wiki and current possibilities.

[koganbot]

What throws me about this side issue is that... well, it is a side issue. That is, Tom says "Wikipedia has yoked together a lot of individual bads into a collective good, and Wikipedia actually works owing to these characteristics" and I say, "Wait, here's a clear and obvious Wikipedia failure, where Wikipedia actually doesn't work." So, to say, "But if people like us would get involved maybe it would work," even if you're right, doesn't address what either Tom or I is saying. Tom's saying, "Here's a collective success" and I'm saying, "No, there's a failure in at least one part."

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

also; a key social function of music in modern society is to be argued about by one and all, it maps the jostling of the tribelets (not true of philosophy or literature: obviously they GET argued about but it's not a key social function, and there's a high bar for entry, as regards who gets to be considered to be usefully arguing, by fellow arguers, in both cases... ) (a high bar that probably has the side-effect of skills at fashioning entries which actually kind of bust through the wiki strictures, but without being challenged...)

[miss-newham.livejournal.com]

Discogs is great for me as I have to look up who wrote/played on old records almost every day at work. I can't imagine who uses it for fun though...

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Same here!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

since it's open source the way it is, its flaws are basically the fault of all those readers who dislike it as is but don't themselves change it -- until they prove to the the fault of rules that block the required changes

i wonder how much the higher quality of the wyndham entry is a function of the fact that he's not a particularly well-known writer, who people don't have particular strong opinions about

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The way this kind of content gets smuggled into Wiki tends to be the section on "Reception", which it's true that a lot of album and certainly song and most band threads lack. For albums part of the problem is the easy access to numerical-grade reviews: Wikipedia has a little box which links to the Pitchfork, AMG, and other reviews.

[(Anonymous)]

it bothers me that you are calling it 'wiki'. that is a general word referring to a certain kind of web-based content display and editing system. 'wikipedia' is the other thing.


j.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with girlboymusic. Wikipedia actively discourages subjective opinions unless they were particularly notable ones - eg if something received the highest ever metacritic score then that would probably be acceptable.

[koganbot]

You mean it's perfectly fine to expect an encyclopedia to suppress analysis and value judgments, with the result being that it sucks, as if this were a virtue? But real encyclopedias don't suppress analysis and value judgments, and Wikipedia claims that through its collective, democratic wisdom it can do what any other encyclopedia does, at least as well.

[mostlyconnect.livejournal.com]

It is a virtue! Wikipedia is something one consumes, like a novel. The pleasure of consuming it is the pretense (perhaps even not all that much of a pretense? Though I guess you would disagree): "Here are the objective facts. I shall now make up my own mind" - for someone to give you their interpretation of the facts would be like the insertion of a cowboy scene into a domestic tragedy - not that cowboy scenes aren't good, but they clearly detract there from the enjoyment of the thing.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Also I never rely on Wiki for chart placings unless absolutely necessary - I've seen plenty that are just plain wrong.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Actually, I kind of side with Frank on this one but also don't really care -- that is, there are LOTS of examples of value-laden, perhaps contentious, Wikipedia entries that depend on a community (usually academic) to provide deeply enriching content, some of it up for debate (and often these wiki entries will summarize opposing or different standpoints fairly, too). Emily told me something about Perseus, a Classics database, being largely responsible for the entries on Greek and Roman mythology, many of which are excellent and provocative. (With this stuff we're somewhere between Ashlee and the Alamo, I think.)

I suspect that the failure of music conversation taking root in Wikipedia is probably as random or non-random (no idea which) as the failure of music conversation taking root in academia: whereas, e.g., film studies has found an interesting interdisciplinary way to define itself somewhere in the intersection of humanities studies and cultural studies and has been (perhaps arbitrarily) guided by debates predating their entrance into film studies in feminism and psychoanalysis and semiotics. Music, on the other hand, always seems to be appropriated into its other disciplines: instead of bringing the disciplines to it, it offers itself to the disciplines and the more holistic and "inside" conversation -- the ones that we tend to have -- exist as, at best, decently-compensated career anomalies (in music journalism, say) and more frequently as more of a hobby pursuit.

Which is all a longwinded way of saying that as long as the Great Pop Conversation wanders without the grounding Holy Land of an academia or some other general funding structure, you're just never going to concentrate that kind of collective energy into translating the many debates and perspectives and opinions into a centralized site (Allmusic is the closest, but it's doing something slightly different; it's more of an expansive review site with a uniquely large roster than a place for collective understanding -- e.g. we can't go back and school Stephen Thomas Erlewine on Ashlee to try to shift the site's working knowledge of her.)

Pop criticism, especially as it manifests online, is in some ways closer to an oral tradition, one carried in the memories and activities of its most active participants, than something that can be easily databased. Of course the Pop Convo isn't inherently like this (film studies is a strong counter-example) -- that just seems to be the way things have turned out for it.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Wasn't clear why I "don't care" -- what I mean is that, given the scattered state of pop knowledge, I don't think it's reasonable to expect a centralized location for recording it, and if there were a centralized location I think it's way too late for it to be Wikipedia. It would probably have to start from the ground up, and that particular online moment -- the idea that everything might be collected in one space that includes the messiness of everything -- has likely passed. I just get the feeling that most people don't think about the internet this way anymore. (Back when enough people knew little enough about the internet, shows could pretend that EVERYTHING was consolidated in one space -- in a given techno-utopian show, someone might find driving records, hospital admittances, and daily lists of high school absences in about four seconds. I'm thinking in part of Willow's early role in Buffy specifically.)

[koganbot]

I think you've put your finger on it: the problem isn't just with wiki but also with music criticism.