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."

[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...

[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

[(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.

[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.