A Look into Niagara's Local Music Scene

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Canadian Music Op Ed Piece


Music is a large part of Canadian culture; and any culture for that matter. In a music culture highly dominated by our neighbours down south, it is important that we as Canadians educate ourselves and protect the music culture that our country has. A dedicated Wikipedia page on Canadian music is important and useful, and it plants Canada as a contributing country for world music. 


The Wiki Talk section of the Music of Canada Wikipedia page is quite extensive (47 discussion topics to be exact), which I believe suggests many good things. (I’m noting now that the “Music of Canada” page is a Wiki-project, meaning that editing is ongoing. The talk page that I am analyzing is the talk page on the project itself – all the topics relate to what you see on the main page.) For one, it means that people are taking interest in the integrity of the knowledge available about Canadian music. It also shows that there is more information to discredit the cliché of “Canadian music sucks” – and that many people are fighting for a national music culture that is documented and can serve the purpose to educate.

I think that the information found on the Canadian Music page is extremely reliable because there is a designated group of people that are making it a project. I particularly liked the topic of “the” Arcade Fire. A user made a point to go through the entire Arcade Fire page and Canadian Music page and add in “the” in front of “Arcade Fire” to ensure that people reading knew the band’s official name. As well, there was a topic dedicated to the dispute over Art Bergmann’s date of birth. These small details might at first seem pointless or miniscule but they in fact are what contributes to the overall reliability of the information  found on this Wiki page, or any Wiki page for that matter. 


There is a topic titled “Casey Sheehan and Weapons of Mass Instruction,” in which a user addresses the proposed deletion of James Gordon, Casey Sheehan and Weapons of Mass Instruction bands from the Wiki page. The manner in which it is proposed is not a final statement, it’s offering up an option of rejection to this idea for fans that believe they contribute to the page and the Canadian music culture. In my opinion this shows a great deal of respect not only for fans of these bands and artists but also to the editor that originally felt compelled to include them on this page. This also runs parallel with Jensen’s idea of the absent boundary between the uneducated and the scholarly editors on Wikipedia. 


This general discussion forum is in no way pretentious or matter of fact. Jensen (2012) quotes Wikipedia’s David Goodman; “The frontier mindset survives in the behavior of people on the net in settings like ours, where they think themselves similarly free from conventional institutional restraints, and the world is open in front of them to exploit and to remake as they choose.” Although exploitation is not the concept I am getting at here, the “remaking” aspect is. What user are doing on this talk page is reworking the previously held notions of music culture to Canadians. 


This doesn’t necessarily mean that people are forgetting about the past and are primarily concerned with the present – they are merely condensing previous generations into a more concise history to make room for the present state of culture which holds the potential for growth.


Finally, in terms of legitimacy of the sources, it is always questionable and with something as ambiguous as music, the concrete sources are very “wishy washy” if you catch my drift. Going through the talk section it’s hard to determine where exactly the sources for the information are coming from other than discussion and debate. I feel this echoes my previous point of Jenkin’s notion of the absent barrier between the educated and non-educated wiki editors. 


Overall, I believe that the information found in this Wikipedia page is about 75% reliable if a number was to be attached. There’s an evident passion for the accuracy of the information and protection of the Canadian music culture by the formation of the Wiki project, and this in my opinion is an extremely good and important thing. The improvement I would see beneficial is to have more defined and concrete sources.


References:

Jensen, R. (2012). Military History on the Electronic Frontier: Wikipedia Fights the War of 1812.
 Journal of Military History. 76, 1. pp 1165-1182

No comments:

Post a Comment

What do you think?