Wikipedia
There’s an ultimately boring article on Wikipedia in today’s "New York Times". For those scoring at home, the article focuses on editing, with the primary controversial topic being Scientology.
I’ll leave the details out, if you’re that interested, you can click through. But what got me to write this was the sidebar, wherein the genre of Panic At The Disco was delineated to be one of the controversial topics.
I’m thinking Panic At The Disco’s fifteen minutes of fame are just about up, but a synapse fired when I was reading this article and I realized, Wikipedia is just like Google, a dominant resource.
I was sitting in the audience at the L.A. Acoustic Music Festival enraptured by Natalie MacMaster and I started to wonder, what exactly is her story?
I didn’t go to her website, which probably wouldn’t render too well on my BlackBerry anyway, I Googled her Wikipedia site and clicked through and started reading.
Turns out she does 250 dates a year. Fascinating, since she just had a baby in February and already has two other kids… When is she home?
And the wealth of information on Bruce Cockburn was truly exhaustive. Drilling down to his honorary doctorates… And I didn’t even know that Jimmy Buffett did Cockburn songs!
If you go to the act’s website, you get Flash animation, you get hyped, you get sold. Sure, you might be able to listen to some music, but the band’s site is not a good place for basic information. You end up with a history that reads like a corporate bio and tour dates and maybe a message board. Whereas when you go to Wikipedia, the site loads just about as fast as Google and you get the raw information.
In other words, make sure your act has a Wikipedia entry!
Unless you want to build mystery. Then you should have neither a Wikipedia page NOR a website. But that twentieth century game is rarely played anymore. Acts complain they can’t break through, not that their privacy is in jeopardy. Therefore, when you launch a new act, you should create a Wikipedia entry!
If the act is brand new, keep the entry limited. If the entry doesn’t fit the act’s status, it ends up looking like hype and it is ignored. If you’re creating your own Wikipedia entry, think of it as a true encyclopedia essay. They might have a page on the Beatles, but Haircut 100 would get just a few lines. But at least online, every act is entitled to an entry!
If you’re lucky, you’ll become big enough that fans will start adding and changing your Wikpedia page. Don’t worry about accuracy. Mistakes make it look like you didn’t write it, they make fans feel superior, wanting to make corrections or just feeling closer to the band than those editing entries. The key is to have a presence, a starting point, where a newbie can get up to speed, can find out who you are and begin his fandom.
