WIKIPEDIA – Overview
My definition of an Under-Appreciated Rock Band is simply this: There is no Wikipedia article on them, or at least nothing beyond a couple of sentences. Wikipedia was founded at the beginning of the current millennium (in January 2001) and is one of the most remarkable websites on earth. Everything on Wikipedia is freely available to anyone with a computer, for copying or for any other purpose, with no copyright limitations whatsoever. There are even books that have been published and sold on hundreds of topics that consist entirely of Wikipedia articles. My Wikipedia article on Milan the Leather Boy that I mentioned last month appears in one such book, on psychedelic rock artists; I have no idea whether it has sold more than 2 or 3 copies – I certainly haven't purchased one.
With some limitations for articles having highly contentious positions on all sides (such as the one on evolution), anyone at all can edit any of its articles and put in whatever they want. Stephen Colbert has famously done that very thing during the broadcast of some of his programs. In some instances, the changes are malicious (known in the wiki-world as "vandalism"), but they are normally changed back rather quickly; I have done some of that myself on occasion (again just this morning as a matter of fact). It takes a while in some cases for the vandalism to be corrected; but then again, there is an item in the Guinness Book of World Records about the longest time that a painting has been mistakenly hung upside-down in an art gallery – and that wasn't just for a couple of days either.
In the beginning, no one thought that a globally collaborative encyclopedia like Wikipedia would create anything reliable or worthwhile, but it has become the sixth most popular site on the Internet, and there must be dozens of similar "wiki" sites now (some are part of the associated non-profit Wikimedia Foundation while others are not). The number of articles on Wikipedia in English alone passed 4 million recently. Most encyclopedias have fixed articles with named authors; some, such as Encyclopædia Britannica have a scholarly take, while others are more general-interest. That is not true of Wikipedia: Nearly all of its contributors operate completely anonymously – more than a few are identified only by IP addresses, though most (like me) have "handles" (to borrow a CB radio term).
My own handle is "Shocking Blue", the name of a Dutch rock band that I have been particularly enamored with for several decades. “That is not the name I was born with, that is my Wikipedia name. Some day all of us will have special names," as Brian O'Blivion might have put it; he is the "television prophet" who appears in the incredible 1983 David Cronenberg horror movie Videodrome that features among its cast members James Woods and Blondie's Debbie Harry.
(August 2012)
