When Sam Machkovech wrote his article on the local online music scene a couple months ago, he referred to us as "a local music Wikipedia of sorts." I didn't entirely take that as a compliment -- while I appreciate the scope of Wikipedia and think its community-edited ideal is a noble one, I do take pride in the fact that we live in a world between the top-down mainstream media and the free-for-all anarchy of community-editing. First, I can guran-damn-tee you that on a local level, the 1,248 events and 101 band pages that were entered into our system last month wouldn't have happened without some direction and organization of our volunteer forces. Further, an editorial layer prevents bands from pulling a fast one on you -- "We play nothing but covers, but we're not a cover band"; "We're a bunch of guys who met last week and just bought instruments playing on a bill with six established local bands, but really we're the headliner."

Yeah, we make some mistakes, but in my mind that's a fair tradeoff for delivering a wealth of information that no one else does. BUT, it should be an entity's job to strive for fewer mistakes, and I'm enough of a cynic to say that "the community" ain't that guy. It might be for Wikipedia, but when you scale down to a local level and have fewer active participants, the intellectual economics change.

Then again, who woulda thunk that when Sam Myers died a coupla weeks ago, his Wikipedia entry would have been updated before the news even hit the wires? 

That's all a lot of ballyhoo to intro a video clip from last night's Colbert Report. Our pal Jeremy is going to a conference on Wikipedia tomorrow, and when I got home tonight and saw this clip on yesterday's re-run, I had to call his attention to it. He wasn't on GoogleChat, so I went retro-twentieth-century mode and emailed him that it was on.

Silly me, I shoulda just sent him the YouTube link, which already had 250 views. (Stick that in your Long Tail and smoke it.)