Yesterday I read this editorial in LA Times about the darkside of Wikipedia. At first I thought, maybe this guy just got burned and he's out for blood. After all, this is the democratization mass media and that means everyone has a voice and that's just so now, isn't it? As a completely unscientific test, I started searching band wikis. Consequently, I learned that dude was totally right about the wiki slant. On the flipside, though, these inconsistencies often disappear within hours.
Let's take Aiden as an example. When I looked the band up this morning, there was this huge rant on the page about how Aiden is said to be emo but it isn't really emo, at least not like "good" bands like Indian Summer. Now it's gone, but I still have to wonder what would possess a person to go into a program that is supposed to function like some sort of democratically produced encyclopedia and spout some sort of nonsense most easily found on a chat board? Then there is Kill Hannah's entry, which seems to be in a bit of disarray at this point.
But it's not just those love/hate bands that have wiki issues. Sometimes it's just a matter of making up scenes for the sake of being authoritative about something. When I looked up Dntel, there was a mention of his former band, Strictly Ballroom, which was apparently described as "Enocore." I called Estelle, who probably saw the band more than I did when we were all working at the same radio station, to see if maybe I forgot something from those days. Unfortunately, I got her voicemail. I'm pretty sure, though, that I wouldn't forget hearing any band referred to as "Enocore," since it's actually a worse title for a non-genre than slowcore and cuddlecore combined. I don't really remember Strictly Ballroom sounding much like Brian Eno either, but, whatever. What's worse is that there is an entry for "mallcore," in which the term is described with the tone of a high school textbook or the guy on the chatboard (and it *is* always a guy) that insists that his musical tastes are the only ones valid. Let's get this straight, the suffix "core" should never be applied to music unless you are talking about things released off of SST in the 1980s and the bands derived from that sound (i.e. hardcore). Doing so is just as bad as admitting to your friends that you won't be going out tonight because you are editing a wiki entry on post-hardcore bands from Goleta, California circa 1997.