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

[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.