Interesting idea

[Zorbas]

I hope it doesn't become as controversial as the original Wiki:

http://www.musicianswiki.com

[wschultz]

It would be nice to have a resource as good as Wikipedia but for everything music.

[hostVentura]

Yeah, well I definately think its a good idea - but I think somehwhere along the line, it'll fail - whether it be a lack of participation, or a lack of intelligent participation, something usually goes wrong with Wikis, IMHO.

[Liquid Shadow]

And you'll undoubtedly get a plethora of uneducated junk from all the wonderful people on the internet who think they know what they're talking about.

[Awake]

It would be nice to have a resource as good as Wikipedia but for everything music.A chap I know has just set up a Wiki that is going to be focussed on electoral stuff, and I think that it's a very positive, interesting idea. However, while it's great and I'll be participating, I don't think that it will likely be as comprehensive as Wikipedia, and for the same reasons, I don't think any resource that specifically focusses on one area can be "as good as Wikipedia."

The reason Wikipedia is good is not actually because it's a Wiki, per se. Certainly it couldn't be as good as it is without being a Wiki, but what actually makes it work is the phenomonally broad user base, the sheer volume of users distributed across multiple time zones. It's the sheer scale of the thing, the breadth of interdisciplinary knowledge and interests that facilitate error correction and expansion at such a rapid pace. When vandalism takes place - or simply the addition of material which is erroneous - it tends to get caught and fixed pretty quickly, because of 'article adoption." For example, yesterday morning, a chap at a school in Indianapolis vandalized the article on the Supreme Court, by adding that crucial bit of knowledge that we'd all been missing about the Court, viz., "AWESOMENESS ROXXORS." I'm not sure what the citation on that, but we can all agree it's a crucial case. Within a couple of minutes, the article had been fixed. I have SCOTUS on my watchlist, but I don't have the other two articles s/he vandalized on my watchlist, but because it's worth checking, I looked at what else that IP address had done, and fixed those articles too (and reported the abuse with timestamps to their school's IT admin). Wikipedia editors are an international bunch, which means that there are always a large number of people in any time zone keeping an eye on it, and I just don't think you can duplicate that. By the very nature of the technology, a Wiki is open to injection of inaccuracy, abuse and falsehood; it's only by social consideration - the user base - that error correction is introduced, and error correction is absolutely critical to a Wiki.

At the same time, Wikipedia places obvious demands on format which tend to restrain the worst excesses of subjectivity, in a way that I don't think another wiki - particularly one on so subjective a matter as music - can be. The problem with a narrowly-focused enterprise is that it doesn't attract that volume of people to become massively expansive and responsive to error correction needs.

This isn't to say that Wikis aren't useful and great and all that (indeed, I'm contemplating using one as the basis for a web project I'm going to start this spring), or that a musician's Wiki couldn't be pretty good. But trying to measure up against Wikipedia is like starting a computer company and measuring your sales against IBM.

[hostVentura]

But trying to measure up against Wikipedia is like starting a computer company and measuring your sales against IBM.

Exactly. Sure, your company sells the same computers as IBM, but your name isn't as recognized. Wikipedia is almost to the point where its a household name, at least with people that have computers - thats really impressive. But for another site thats similar but takes out a huge audience, well - good luck to them.