Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-08/WikiProject report

WikiProject Report: WikiProject Music

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1. Share with us your history as an editor here on Wikipedia.

   I started on 2 November 2005. I'd seen wikis before, but hadn't really understood the idea. I intended to put about a dozen things I'd written in the public domain. When I did that I was immediately hauled up for infringing my own copyright! I guess that was the equivalent of being thrown in the deep end of the swimming pool!

   Anyway, I soon found that MediaWiki/Wikipedia had solutions for many of the typical problems encountered in the editing of print encyclopedias (which is my background) and I became fascinated.

   At first I focused on opera. Back in 2005 there were only about 1,500 articles under the scope of the Opera Project. They were rudimentary. Popular music was better served - at least in terms of the sheer number of articles. So I persuaded some friends of mine from a well-known internet list to join. Some of them found collective editing difficult to accept, but a few of them stayed on and with some other prolific editors joining at around the same time, the project became one of the most dynamic medium-sized ones on the encyclopedia. In September 2008 the project achieved the milestone of its 5,000th article.

   Over the last year or so I've been gradually shifting my interest to other related groups: Composers, Classical music, Contemporary music, and the big umbrella, coordinating projects of Music and Arts.

   What kind of editor am I? I suppose I'm basically a contributor - I've started about 250 articles - but I'm also a copyeditor. (My rule is to never let a typo remain once I've spotted it!) I'm involved in processes like assessments, bot runs etc. which offer tremendous possibilities for the future if we can improve them . . . . and recently I have been working on a series of large, complex, re-sortable tables of musical works - of a kind that we couldn't do in print.

2. For those who might be unfamiliar with the concept of an umbrella project, what purpose does WP Music serve? Why doesn't it have an assessment table?

   The Music Project is an alternative place for discussions. Most of the 50-odd active music-related projects are small, typically with 20, 50 or 100 articles devoted to a single band, genre, instrument or whatever, and need to talk to other groups from time to time. It's also good to just keep in touch. The larger projects like Classical MusicorJazz may not need this interaction, but small groups can easily lose motivation - we already have about 70 inactive ones listed by the WikiProject Council!

   The Project also has the MUSTARD or 'Music Standards' guidelines. More work is needed to make sure they include editing practices and styles developed by individual projects on the one hand, and are consistent with WP-wide practice, the Manual of Style etc. on the other, but this will become an important resource in the future.

   The Music Project did have a talk-page banner at one stage but it was displayed on only 4,000 articles out of an estimated 150,000 total pages (July 2008 figures). We discussed whether or not it would be viable to banner and assess all 150,000 pages but decided against it. So assessments are left to the specialized music projects such as Albums (71,000 articles), Songs (29,000), Classical Music (9,500), Opera (5,300), Composers (4,300) Jazz (3,500), Rock (3,500) etc. The banners are gone and it's become an overarching umbrella like the Arts Project. I think this makes sense, music is incredibly broad - no-one attempts to cover it all. Bannering would have just created more talk page clutter, huge numbers of unassessed or mis-assessed articles. Detailed written assessments of the kind done by the Composers Project (see here) would have been impossible on this mega-scale.

3. On the subject of centralized discussions, I noticed on the WP Music talk page that six archives are dedicated to the "Infobox debate". What was that all about?

   Infoboxes (especially biographical ones) have long been controversial! The long debate you've seen was about whether or not to remove genre fields from the boxes used by some of the projects. Genre is always an important factor in music interpretation, hence the 'passionate' interest in this subject.

4. What other major discussions have occurred within WP Music?

   Back in 2003 the first discussion was about piped 'year in music' links, and the last longish discussion was about sources for verifying the notability of rock bands. Reliable sources preoccupy the projects. Young musicians of all kinds want to have pages on Wikipedia, and we have to decide if they are notable. It's tricky and a lot of pages are sent to WP:AFD for scrutiny.

5. The music industry is extremely fast-paced, so it is understandable why music projects would have massive surges of article creation like the one you described for WP Opera. However, music also represents a fairly sizeable chunk of all featured articles. How do music editors manage to keep up with new information while still producing featured content?

   Actually, although there are a lot featured articles on music, many editors (myself included) are working on improving overall coverage rather than improving individual articles to featured standard. (Rather than produce a limited number of long, well -referenced pages, some of us are trying to match the scope of the established music encyclopedias like Grove, before starting to attempt to compete with them in quality.) Also it's worth noting the progress of the top 10 or so main projects (including the dynamic Opera) has been fairly steady and will continue.

   Having said that, the small narrow, niche projects, devoted to a single band, composer, or genre have been excellent at recruiting knowledgeable, enthusiastic people to write up-to-date, high quality articles. I was involved in setting up and assessing the Wagner Project which was a good example (only 74 articles but high quality). These projects, by definition, work in surges/spurts, but that's fine of course, that's the way it should be.

6. For inexperienced editors looking to get involved, would you recommend jumping right into the WP Music discussions, or to find a project relevant to a more specific interest first?

   A specific music project, perhaps even a specific article or group of articles - there's a list here. (It would be great if everybody - not just new editors - could adopt articles relating to 'their' music.) If there isn't a suitable project in existence, then a new one can be proposed on the Music discussion page, here. If at least a few people are interested, then I'm sure someone will be available to help set it up. Thank you.

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8 February 2009 (all comments)

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