In which I remember that writing on Wikipedia is fun.

Casual meet with some Wikimedia UK people last night. As is standard whenever two or three Wikimedians meet, we conspired to fix everything that’s wrong with Wikipedia and Wikimedia! Perhaps 1% will ever be attempted. One project that desperately needs participants is Wikisource, particularly so that it can handle incoming documents from museums and archives — Commons is doing okay with the images.

Last week I took The Wolfgang Press from two paragraphs to a proper article. Yesterday it was on the front page Did you know? section for six hours and got 3065 hits, compared to its usual 25-50. Not bad for an article about an obscure band approximately no-one cares about. (“Kansas”, from Bird Wood Cage, is a lost goth rock classic. DJs, please play. Thank you.) I’d forgotten how much quiet nerdy fun it is writing and researching a Wikipedia article. Writing about anything artistic on Wikipedia is arse, though, unless you can find critics to quote. Printed ones by preference. Wikipedia’s epistemology is severely broken at the edges, and knowing how it got that way doesn’t actually help.