Ruh roh! Jimmy Wales is worried.
During the annual Wikimania conference in Haifa, Israel, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told the Associated Press that the organization is “scrambling to simplify what he called ‘convoluted’ editing templates that may be discouraging people from writing and editing Wikipedia’s entries.”
This issue came up in 2009, and Wales shrugged it off, saying that the number of editors was “stable” and quipping that, “You can’t keep growing forever – there are only so many people on the Internet.” But by tweaking and simplifying the editing process, which has worked so far to maintain a quality of content trusted by hundreds of millions of visitors, Wikipedia indicates that something needs to change.
I guess Jimmy didn’t read our post on the greatest Wikipedia entry of all time, or he’d know that everything is fine. So let’s reassure the man; here’s an example of why the status quo is a-ok. It’s from the article on Frank Zappa’s landmark album Freak Out!
MGM staff producer Tom Wilson offered the band a record deal on the Verve Records division in early 1966. He had heard of their growing reputation but had seen them perform only one song, “Trouble Every Day”, which concerned the Watts riots. According to Zappa, this led Wilson to believe that they were a “white blues band.” The group signed their contract on March 1, 1966 and quickly began work on their first album. This would have made them a part of the “white blues band” trend, initiated in 1965 with the debut of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band from Chicago and the 1966 debut of the Blues Project from New York City.
See? Had The Mothers of Invention been a white blues band, they would have become part of the white blues band trend.
The only thing I’d change in this article? I’d make it clearer that Zappa was not a white blues artist. As we can clearly see in the photo above, he was a metal musician.