So please don't quote a URL to me prefixed with "aych tee tee pee colin slash slash". It is unnecessary and you sound silly.
Thank you!
They are filling the gap Wikipedia is uninterested in filling.
Unfortunately, such a site shouldn't be needed.
A quick look through the site either shows they're not yet very popular, or users are wary of adding articles about themselves.
No one wants to look egotistical.
And what is "indie"?
I'd almost go as far as to say that "indie" in this context is anything Wikipedia rejects...
I've mirrored the Walken Wikipedia article (with a few minor extras) just in case.
This article lacks information on the importance of the subject matter. If you are familiar with it, please expand the article, or discuss its significance on the talk page.
The thing is... I agree completely. You'd be lucky to find a couple of thousand people who have seen my band live, and most of those weren't paying any attention. A few hundred people own our CDs. That isn't very important. There are hundreds of thousands of bands like us. I just didn't realise being "important" mattered on Wikipedia. I was wrong.
I always saw Wikipedia as a central, organised, and easy to find permanent historical information record. It's organisation and central location (URL and URL format) is what makes it different to the internet as a whole.
The thought comes up that at some point my band will fade away, the official site will come down, and then information on our band would be scattered and difficult to find. A central place where obscure, peer reviewed information can be found is a goldmind for future internet users and it's exactly what has been missing.
I give another less ego filled example.
I love The Sharp. They're a Melbourne band from the mid to late 1990s. They were huge. Top 10 hits, constant radio play, two albums, tons of singles. But then they broke up and went away.
It was uncool to like The Sharp at the time because they were unashamed to be pop and the mid 90's was a breeding ground for alternative snobery.
The internet was just beginning and there were a few fan sites for the band. When they broke up the sites kept going for a few years and then faded away.
Jump forward a decade and try to find "The Sharp" on the internet. The years have added to their obscurity and it doesn't help that they share their name with an adjective and a well known electronics brand.
But go to Wikipedia and search for "The Sharp" and you're sent straight to the band's page. From there you're linked to the two existing fan sites on the web (one of which is mine), both of which are very difficult to find with Google without appending band member names to your search.
Do you see my point?
My attempts to create an article on "on-hold" Melbourne band Pre-Shrunk have been rejected. I'm researching an article now in the hope that if I post a complete information filled article that it will stick. Although the more I think about it, the less I care.
It's quiet possible that what I want isn't Wikipedia but some kind of centrally known "notepad" where people can point random bits of peer reviewed information (URLs, real-world-paper-article snippets, images, quotes) on obscure things so future historians have a starting point to find. Old URLs could be plugged into The Wayback Machine, old quotes could be searched on...
Does something like this exist?
I was originally turn on to Wikipedia not for it's "anyone can edit" policy, but it's "anyone can add" policy.
If an article on a topic was missing, you could add it. And by adding an article, it came to the attention of others and they kept it up to date. The dream began... no matter how obscure a topic, an expert on that topic could inform the world. On the off chance that someone wanted to look up that topic or link to information on that topic, here was a page they could easily find and link to.
This works particularly well, I thought, for bands. I find nothing more frustrating in the world than discovering a band on an old compilation from as early as the late 1990s and not being able to find a single piece of information on them. I don't care if they released 100 albums or just that one song, I want to know that.
But in practice Wikipedia has limits. And more limits are added every day. If something is obscure enough, the article might get marked as so, or deleted.
As soon as you begin questioning the importance of any article on Wikipedia you take away everything I love about it.
Think for a moment about Metallica. Imagine they began today the same way they began all those decades ago. They were a live band, a few people know about them, they gain popularity through a pirated demo tape, they had no albums released.
Imagine someone created an article on Metallica on Wikipedia and it was deleted for not being "of importance". The fan goes elsewhere, creates a page on a free blogging site, and a couple of years on they move on, the blogging site shuts down and the information is lost.
Imagine then that a couple of years later Metallica takes off and people begin looking for information on the band.
There isn't any.
So they begin to write an article on Metallica, only now it's being written two years in the future, and details are blurry... maybe there is something hidden away in The Wayback Machine but good luck finding it.
Waiting until something is "important" enough to write about is waiting too long.
Imagine Metallica never took off. Image that demo tape was all there was. Imaging you found that demo tape now and wanted to look up Metallica and there was no information?
Isn't that annoying?
Try to write an article on a twenty year old band with no famous members who have only released a demo tape and see how long it lasts.
The more we document the better.
The importance of what we write is decided by those that read it in the future, not by us.