Editing PickiPedia:About

PickiPedia is a knowledge base about bluegrass, old time, and other traditional and public domain music that anyone can edit.

PickiPedia is currently in a pre-launch / testing phase, but the account creation and editing facilities are online, so feel free to make an account and make some edits.  The URL structure will most definitely change, so don't treat any links as permalinks yet.

Some basic initial guidelines:

* In most places where records, songs, and shows are listed or described, we will list them in a way that prioritizes those released directly into the public domain over those that aren't, and which prioritizes those that are available in a [[free music|free]] and lossless format over those that aren't.

It has some similarities and differences from WikiPedia:

a) Unlike wikipedia, which is designed to prioritize its editorial principles (such as NPOV, NOR, etc) over experimenting with anarchic collaboration, PickiPedia is designed to facilitate the already-existing anarchic and cypherpunk practices of sharing of information that are inherent in bluegrass, old time, and deadhead communities. 

b) Since many of the editors of PickiPedia are likely to be musicians themselves, PickiPedia can house some original research and assertions, where those assertions are made by accounts verified to belong to people in a position to make such a claim.  For example, if a musician makes an edit which constitutes an announcement of an upcoming record, we can regard that edit itself as the source of information about that album, instead of requiring an external primary source.

c) Users are welcome and even encouraged to make edits about themselves and their projects.  They are also encouraged to seek patrolling / validation of those edits by other users (and perhaps if it's not too technically tricky, we can mark edits as such - we are exploring whether features like this are available in any existing mediawiki extension or whether is is practical for us to build it ourselves).

d) The model of structured data can be dictated by the needs of external APIs, rather than the data integrity of the wiki itself.  For example, as a userbase - enforced by soft consensus rather than admin power - we may decide that the canonical structure of information about most records and most shows needs to comply with the API design of the [[Oracle of Bluegrass Bacon]] (even though this does not advance the goals of the wiki as an encylopedic resource).