To Wiki, Or Not To Wiki?
By Antony Bruno
8.27.07

Open-Source Tool Is A Double-Edged Sword For Music Sites

The wild world of wikis gained another member this week.

Music video TV Channel Fuse is launching a music artist wiki site where fans can post information, photos, videos and reviews about any artist they wish. The company will add exclusive content of its own to each artist profile, drawing from its database of interviews, live concerts and other footage captured via the TV channel.

In doing so, Fuse is entering a crowded and controversial space that is filled with successes and failures alike.
A wiki is an online collaborative tool that lets anyone make edits, add or remove text and in some cases upload multimedia like photos or videos to articles about a given topic. The largest and perhaps most well-known wiki source is Wikipedia, which is one of the top 10 most-visited Web sites in the world.

This open-source approach to information is a double-edged sword. On one hand, entries benefit from the knowledge and expertise of sometimes thousands of readers who constantly monitor and update the topics that interest them most. On the other hand, it doesnt take much for one person to spread misinformation, either through ignorance or by design.

In most cases, the vast community of wiki users quickly root out inaccuracies and make corrections before any real damage is done. But its harder to eradicate spin.

A CalTech grad student recently created a Wikipedia Scanner designed to track users who make anonymous edits on Wikipedia entries. In many cases, the anonymous edits were made by the subject of the article and some tracked back to the music industry.

Its not unusual for publicity reps to post the official bio of an act on its wiki pages, be it on Wikipedia or more niche music wikis sites like MusicWikiGuide and Last.fm. But Internet sleuths tracked more questionable edits back to the IP addresses of several major labels. Examples include deleting negative comments others had made and adding obvious marketing text to album descriptions.

According to Sean Carton, chief strategy officer of Web marketing consulting firm idfive, this is a common practice that corporations of all stripes pursue in a fruitless effort to control their online image.

People can sniff out marketing talk a million miles away, he says. If someone tries to edit their own artists entries to put them in a positive light, people are just going to avoid it because its counter to the spirit of the whole genre. The thought that you can control your brand these days is just absurd. Whether you like it or not, people are saying things about you in various public forums.

The risk of a wiki turning into either a record label mouth-piece or a forum for artist bashing has kept several potential music wiki sources from entering the game. Virtually every digital music subscription service operating today says it is mulling the idea, but has not yet settled on a specific strategy.

The only one to even try it, Napster, shut it down in a matter of months. When the company relaunched its Web site last May, it made a big deal out of a user-generated artist-based wiki service called the Narchive. The original plan was to give members free rein on what they posted, but the company officials say they chickened out for fear of artist profiles being defaced by negative comments.

Napster switched it to more of a moderated message board format that gave the company more control over content, but it never attracted the traffic expected and closed shortly after.

Fuse VP of digital media Beth Lewand hopes to avoid these issues by making Fuses wiki site more than merely a source of information, but a shared community where like-minded fans can share their experiences with their favorite artists.

"Were not taking the academic approach like Wikipedia," she says. "Its more accessible and designed to be fun--a place to not only post facts, but also express yourself."

The company also wants to work with record labels, tour venues and record stores to contribute as well. It will be interesting to see how Fuse juggles the music industrys desire to use wikis as a source of promotion (and propaganda) with fans desires for something useful and real.

The difficulty is that most companies doing this want to control the message all the time, Carton says. They dont want wikis to operate the way they should, which is to have a forum where people can pretty much say whatever they want. That just scares the crap out of them."