The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #169606   Message #4100003
Posted By: Tony Rees
30-Mar-21 - 05:49 PM
Thread Name: Key folk figures absent from Wikipedia?
Subject: RE: Key folk figures absent from Wikipedia?
Dick raises the justifiable point about missing articles regarding arguably notable folk music performers, as indeed does the original poster in this thread (hence the thread title).

There does appear to be a mechanism to review such coverage, and possibly inspire contributions in the "missing article" space. The mechanism is via a WikiProject (Wikipedia project) entitled "Missing encyclopedic articles" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_articles). Under this project, an interested person can compile a list of topics (folk music performers in this instance) from a suitably "encyclopaedic" source (a suggestion, for pre-1993 acts at least, might be the "Guinness Who's Who of Folk Music"), as wikipedia links, which are then displayed in blue where an article with that name exists, and red if it does not (thus, a prompt for someone to maybe create it). For a non-musical example, see Missing encyclopedic articles/Encyclopaedia of the Viking Age. Such a list might go some way towards addressing concerns of non-comprehensive coverage such as expressed by Dick.

I might even create this list, if pressed, and no-one else wishes to volunteer their services. I do have the book mentioned, although if somebody wants to suggest a more up-to-date equivalent from their holdings, go for it (but then you would have to create the list...)

Of course all such resources have their own limitations. For example the "Guinness Who's Who" has an entry for Dick Miles (gasp) but not Lea Nicholson. But it would be another step along the road, maybe.

- Tony