Last week I took The Wolfgang Press in Wikipedia 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.) Google Books and Google Scholar help, but if you don’t have access to a significant clippings pile, or a really well-indexed library collection, it’s ridiculously difficult to write about things that happened before 1995. Though McFarlane is still on the Internet Archive and basically just needs someone experienced in Wikipedia’s little ways slogging through it. Do you feel lucky, punk?
I don’t feel lucky, but I do feel oddly tempted. /o\
Hmm, the archived version seems to be mostly inaccessible due to darknet issues — navigation to any letter other than A is via web form, which the archive doesn’t know how to crawl. Or am I missing something?
Huh. I got to it before. I think I had to do some scurvy tricks to get to the other letters, and wrote a shonky shell script to scrape most of it. The URLs are of the form http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.whammo.com.au/encyclopedia.asp?articleid=NNNN, where N goes from 1 to 1086, with gaps. It’d be nice to have the actual book, of course …
Presumably it’s in a lot of libraries. I was looking forward to spending some hot summer days sitting in the airconditioned State Library of Victoria when I get back, working on Wikipedia stuff, so this might be a good candidate for that.