UBC journo student Amanda Ash gets $15,000 to work on a wiki for CBC Radio 3. The subject? Canadian music and musicians. Shall we wait a year and compare the extent and quality of entries for, say, Matthew Good, the Tragically Hip, and Alexisonfire versus Deko-Ze, MC Mario, and Ivana Santilli?
$15K R3 wiki
I’m actually Joe Clark. Fake Ouimet is merely a username.
Published August 10, 2009 3:10 pm
12 Comments
@raccon. there are no records. its a digital jukebox. hosts are paid all over the country to shuffle and sort. that’s it. that’s more of a scandal than paying actual djs if you ask me.
rotation is determined by some sort of dim committee that keeps things poppy, short and sweet. forget anything dark, long or interesting.
Not only that, but I hear CBC pays dozens of people, all over the country, to play records.
what would this new wiki do that their new music canada pages don’t. or for that matter what myspace fails to do. or what wikipedia pages about bands fails to do.
or….god this seems like a boring and redundant project. …perfect for R3.
It has certainly been ill-explained. There is no end of room online for the project to be well-explained (including in this comments section), but it hasn’t been thus far. Of course, the day is young in the Pacific time zone.
Old Farmer’s Wikipedia does a credi(ta)ble job of at least hosting a page for numerous famous and unfamous Canadian bands ‒œ Moev, for example. Sons of Freedom. That sort of thing. Look at its R3-compatible list of Canadian alternative-rock bands.
The advantage an R3 wiki might have is imprimatur. Maybe Amanda Ash could go around asking bandmembers to fill in details, and if she does that the advice “It’s for CBC†might be value-adding.
Plus there might be less ridiculous and picayune rules on what is and is not a reliable source. A great deal of bullshit gets into Old Farmer’s Wikipedia because of its rules.
So I see the potential for it to work. And a year or two in, the content could just be inhaled into Wikipedia.
Nobody has been attacked, Anonymoose. Also, I deny being a fuckwit.
… and it hardly takes a lot of technology to publish a podcast. Puh-leeze.
Dude, you’re a freaking satellite radio channel. Get used to it.
Well to be fair they also develop a lot of in house programs
RAPP, the web app that publishes our podcasts is built and maintained by them for example.
Sorry, but what are all those R3 tech guys doing? It doesn’t take that many people to keep a webpage up.
Bob, exactly how many “tech guys” do you think r3 has? And exactly how many people do you think it should take to “keep a webpage up?” For some perspective, one “webpage” (Myspace) recently laid off 400 people.
As far as the wiki goes – a wiki is, by definition, user generated, so any loser… erm I mean user can write the Deko-ze and MC Mario entries.
And BTW, you aren’t very likely to hear Matthew Good, The Tragically Hip or Alesisonfire on r3 – so I’m not really sure what point you are trying to make.
Erm, R3 has a number of full time computer-tech people, didn’t you know? Comparing it to Myspace is beyond silly. And I didn’t say anything about programming, so I’m not sure what point you’re making either.