As with Wikipedia, users can edit this information, but not directly. All changes must be vetted by Amazon staff before appearing on the site, so you can forget about retroactively joining Run D.M.C. Rankings charts list the users with the most approved edits for the day, week or of all time, offering a bit of motivation to those want to amass that sort of authority.
Wikipedia is a snakepit of fan pages and official biographies masquerading as objective encyclopedia articles, but compared to some articles currently on SoundUnwound, Wikipedia is infallible.
SoundUnwound does put less emphasis on objectivity and verifiability guidelines, but in my opinion they have a little way to go if they want to overtake Wikipedia in the accuracy stakes. The first article I checked (Porcupine Tree), was woeful:
Sky Moves Sideways (1995) is considered to be Porcupine Tree’s seminal album, but the sound continued to evolve with Signify (1996), Stupid Dream (1999) and Lightbulb Sun (2000), becoming progressively rockier, a musical direction confirmed by the release of In Absentia (2002) and Deadwing (2005).
Moderating edits is a stroke of genius, but unless the moderation team is stacked with experts in every band ever formed they'll have trouble distinguishing between valuable, true information and, well, bollocks. That paragraph quoted above is clearly just the opinion of whoever wrote it, and contains a glaring mistake in the title of The Sky Moves Sideways.
People like myself who would usually just fix that kind of error might be put off by the requirement to register and have the changes go through a vetting process.
Then again, the lack of penis references in a website containing user-generated content is most refreshing.
Amazon Takes on Wikipedia With Editable Music Data
2008-09-04 04:06Amazon is backing a user-editable music information repository called SoundUnwound:
Wikipedia is a snakepit of fan pages and official biographies masquerading as objective encyclopedia articles, but compared to some articles currently on SoundUnwound, Wikipedia is infallible.
SoundUnwound does put less emphasis on objectivity and verifiability guidelines, but in my opinion they have a little way to go if they want to overtake Wikipedia in the accuracy stakes. The first article I checked (Porcupine Tree), was woeful:
Moderating edits is a stroke of genius, but unless the moderation team is stacked with experts in every band ever formed they'll have trouble distinguishing between valuable, true information and, well, bollocks. That paragraph quoted above is clearly just the opinion of whoever wrote it, and contains a glaring mistake in the title of The Sky Moves Sideways.
People like myself who would usually just fix that kind of error might be put off by the requirement to register and have the changes go through a vetting process.
Then again, the lack of penis references in a website containing user-generated content is most refreshing.