PickiPedia:Is Not WikiPedia

From PickiPedia: A knowledge base of bluegrass, old time, and other traditional and public domain music
Revision as of 05:15, 28 January 2026 by JMyles (talk | contribs)
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    • (work in progress)**

For most people, WikiPedia represents the canonical wiki - it's probably the project that first comes to mind when thinking about the word "wiki". WikiPedia is ambitious. Heck, it's one of the most high-reaching yet steadfast efforts humanity has ever undertaken. But PickiPedia does not seek to be a smaller WikiPedia. It seeks to be a different style of collaboration that is only possible in small-batch, dextrous communities.

WikiPedia is stylized and arduous; PikiPedia is non-trivially a repository oftrolling farce.

Although PickiPedia strives to unrivaled excellence and prehistoric reverie, it is, at times, satirical.

Just keep the structured data tight and we'll be good.

Guidelines and Policies

WikiPedia strives to be neutral, verifiable, and secondary. These and other guidelines are eloquently listed in WikiPedia's Content Guidelines, which by themselves are an achievement in clarifying what an information-age encyclopedia is and can be.

PickiPedia, on the other hand, does not prohibit primary source edits. Because our users are also pickers and fans, it makes sense to leverage their knowledge and experiences - an obvious example is a band announcing their own show, or a fan posting pictures from that show. Instead, we are concerned with the provenance of the information, and how it can be understood in the web-of-trust topology of the traditional music connectome.

PickiPedia is also not necessarily neutral. If a user makes an aesthetic observation about a track, and other users agree with it, it's welcome here. Also, some of the best PickiPedia content, like all bluegrass, consists of satire, trolling, and shitposting.

WikiPedia expressly eschews being cast as an experiment in free-speech or anarchic collaboration. PickiPedia, on the other hand, is designed to be these things. PickiPedia does not have layers of administrators and stewards, and its databases and codebase are small enough that it can be forked / hijacked at any time if a portion of the userbase has a problem with its handling / hosting.

How ThinkingEntities (especially persons) are described and categorized

PickiPedia presumes that a person has many interests, skills, and stories, and avoids describing people using a single noun referring to a notable career. It also does not require that a person, band, instrument, or other important topic pass a notability test - obscure, small, and upcoming content is welcome here.

The WikiPedia style guide on the opening paragraph of biographical text lists five examples, all of which are in the format <name> {is/was} a <noun>. WikiPedia's guide for disambiguating people expressly calls for using "a noun describing what they are most perceived to be noted for. The disambiguator is usually a noun indicating what the person is noted for being in their own right. In most cases, these nouns are standard, commonly used tags such as '(musician)' and '(politician)'."

By contrast, biographical information on PickiPedia emphasizes the verbs typical of a person's activities, and has a template for achieving this.