Jon Freeman has done very well with his folkinfo.org.

Well that site's been gone a while now, Joe.

I did consider a wiki type page a couple of times. I think after the layout change, I'd have opted to have as another tab with the discussion and song tabs. Whatever that never got off the ground.

Thinking back now, while I think we (perhaps helped by starting from scratch) were in a position to present things in way that personally I think more effective for songs and I think where we could try other ideas, a major problem there was generating enough interest/contributions (perhaps not helped by restrictions on material requiring a tune perhaps my own personality etc.) to do something like that.

Moving on to your mention of books in your following post. We had 2 possible methods there.

The source for a song was always given so it was possible to pick out all entries we had from a given book. There were problems there though in that a misspelling of the book would throw a query and that in the case of ST we didn't duplicate songs we already had. I think the workaround (which I sort of used to produce the ST listing at joe-offer.com – that process was part manual to create a small table I could run a query against) would have been to maintain book index table although policies such as no more than 10% from in print books would have limited its usefulness…

The other posiblity would have been the abc projects which I it had have been used would probably have been more useful for tunes. I think had that one at least in a draft form – possibly lost – would allow a sort of 'project manager' and contributors. Pretty crude but to use ST as the example the idea would be that different people could take on different pamphlets, submit these as abc text files and the system would produce the indexes pdfs midis etc. from that.

Coming back to me doing a good job and thinking about things today    I think (largely thanks to dmcg who posted the bulk of the songs and to you for ensuring its not lost) we did wind up with a nice collection of songs and the abc converter now managed at mandolin tab remains useful and we had a few ideas etc. - but maybe it could have been better…

Whatever, I remain happily retired from trying these sort of projects and am still a little unsure even where I am with folk music – although re the latter, the gift on a new Ome Celtic tenor banjo has got me playing tunes at home more than I'd been doing in a good nuber of years