Wikipedia - which band has the nerdiest/crap-trivia-filled page

I love when the entries have years of trivial cruft piled up, like: “On July 23, 2013, she teased her new single in a Twitter post.[1] The song’s title was revealed on August 12, 2013, in an Instagram live session.[2]”….

Someone’s got to record this stuff for future generations

My buddy and I will share our favorite lol bits. Like this one today about David Lee Roth's Eat'Em and Smile:

Sonrisa Salvaje (literally "Wild Smile") is the Spanish-language version of Eat 'Em and Smile. According to the Van Halen Encyclopedia, the idea to re-record the album in Spanish was the idea of bassist Billy Sheehan, who had read an article in a magazine which reported that over half the Mexican population was between the ages of 18 and 27, a prime record buying market.[23] Roth re-cut all his vocals with the help of a Spanish tutor in the studio. He edited some of risqué lyrics, so as not to offend the more conservative Spanish-speaking population.

i remember reading an interpretation of the lyrics to some springsteen song on one of its pages (don't remember which) that was the absolute height of wankery + read like the work of a high school sophomore. this was back when i would actually make occasional edits and i was tempted to just delete the whole thing, but i found it kinda funny so i just added a 'citation needed' for effect

another wonderful thing about pop wikipedia is how literally almost every single chart hit released in the past two decades has apparently received "generally positive reviews from (blue link) contemporary music critics", even when half the cited reviews are one-paragraph blog posts announcing the song's release the same day + a youtube embed. i deleted a citation to one such "review" that was literally to a blog post about a song's 30-second preview before it even came out, but no, it was put back and considered a "positive review" because whoever wrote the blog post said it sounded like "a banger". half the ppl making edits on these songs' pages have usernames derived from the artists' song lyrics. pseudo-objective unpaid e-team marketing pablum

I love when the entries have years of trivial cruft piled up, like: “On July 23, 2013, she teased her new single in a Twitter post.[1] The song’s title was revealed on August 12, 2013, in an Instagram live session.[2]”….

― rendered nugatory (morrisp), Sunday, 28 April 2024 20:10 (forty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This sort of thing usually passes GAN (Good Article Nomination) for recent albums, which are most of the nominations overall. And I'm not sure how I feel about it, but until people write enough biographies about Kanye or whoever that can contextualise background info neatly we're gonna get stuck with ugly articles that are just a list of dates.

it was put back and considered a "positive review" because whoever wrote the blog post said it sounded like "a banger". half the ppl making edits on these songs' pages have usernames derived from the artists' song lyrics. pseudo-objective unpaid e-team marketing pablum

Tbf both sound fishy even by wikipedia guidelines. My friend has his account deleted over a decade ago because he never changed his (dumb) username from having 'youtubechannel' in the name. I think most of the discussion about what goes in critical reception sections happens at wikiproject albums (rather than songs) but it should, and I think generally does, apply across the board. besides being stupid, a passing comment that a song is good shouldn't really be used anyway, especially when there is a plethora of actual good sources to use.

that's the other pop wikipdedia thing, as illustrated above several times - the constant use of tiny quotations.

I don’t normally f with editing Wikipedia, but last year I made a project out of fixing a page for a well-known song which stated a “fan theory” as fact (one of those factoids that’s repeated all over the Internet, but which there’s not actually a true source for). The issue had been raised on the Talk page over the years, but the standard for fixing it was some sort of “prove the negative” situation.

After a few deletions of my edits and more Talk back-and-forth, I finally got it done; thanks to a sympathetic & skillful editor who saw what I was doing, looked at my source for debunking the rumor, and incorporated the correction (better than I had originally done).