Oh, good; a soapbox debate! I'd like to compliment Barry Finn on his dense but lucid prose - you have presented a clear summation of the quandary in which I find myself a lot of the time.
I belong to a large social group of people on the East Coast who sing; sometimes for money, sometimes for friends, but mostly for the sheer love of singing. NONE of us are professional laborers; we're mostly suburban-dwelling, well educated, white collar professionals. However, the music that fascinates me and many of my friends are the traditional songs sung by people to accompany their work or for their own enjoyment when work was done. Many of us have had to learn these songs from books or records; we're not Cecil Sharp, John Lomax or Helen Creighton, who had the interest, ambition and opportunity to actually go out to the communities where the songs were sung and passed down in the oral tradition and collect them from the sources.
Having a database and discussion line where people can pass these hard-to-find songs around is one way to keep this treasure alive. I also like rock, opera, show tunes and other types of song, and sing them (well, some of them - I don't DO opera) in the shower or while commuting in my car (Public Transit doesn't permit you to sing aloud; it scares the other passengers). However, I can find SCADS of books, records, etc. containing these kinds of music in my local library, bookstore or record shop. I CAN"T find the lyrics to a Bahamian sea shanty quite so easily there; many of the source books or recordings are now out of print.
I would like to see this database and discussion line concentrate on the kinds of music that are hard to find elsewhere; I don't mean to be exclusionary, but I think referring people with pop music queries to already existing sites specializing in that type of music in a courteous fashion can help keep this site from being overwhelmed with too many threads to ignore or load in a reasonable time. I REALLY wish that Dick and Max could put together a little header for the thread page just saying this is a folk/trad oriented group, and perhaps giving a few technical tips on how to name threads, how to avoid multiple postings, etc., and one link to a separate page full of those links that people have discovered for other types of music, like roughstock/cowpie, Kenny Bellew's karaoke link page, etc.
The DT also needs to emphasize its disclaimer on its sources; A lot of the lyrics in DT are one person's interpretation of what he/she heard on a record, and may not be completely accurate. I think the source recording/book should be listed wherever possible, and whether the lyrics given are a transcription or taken from a written source, so that variations and errors don't get established as "gospel" by the users of DT. I've seen "Rise Up Singing" turning into the King James version of folk song, with people crippled by thinking the version in the book is the only "right" one; I'd hate to have the DT contribute to the same problem.
Similarly, when contributing lyrics to the thread list, folks should try to give their sources. If you think a song was written by a non-anonymous author, but you don't know the author's name, give your source so someone else can try to dig it up if they're so inclined. A lot of the folks who answer questions on here are really wonderful about giving the authors and sources of copyright material; it's a habit that should be STRONGLY encouraged!
We don't need to debate what folk music is or isn't, but try to make this site a place where the hard-to-find songs can fluorish, without being choked out by the music you can hear on the commercial radio station down the street. If you want the lyrics to the latest Nine Inch Nails song, you and 200,000 other people can find it in the nearest record store or on the umpteen fan web sites that crop up around any popular music group. If you want to find the lyrics to Charlie Poole's Frankie and Johnnie or the Gaelic version of The Mist Covered Mountains, this is one of your only hopes. Let's keep this site as uncluttered with redundancy as we can...