EFFORTPOST How one obscure Wikipedia article and its drama highlights the issue at the very core of Wikipedia, conceptually

We know Wikipedia is screwed beyond recognition but it's not clear what the precise issue is - I think this article shows us.

The article is question is regarding the musician Jandek, who is beyond description (and the wiki article no longer tries to really describe him, either). In absolutely most big picture summary:

• A guy gives himself the stage name Jandek in 1978 and self-records an album via tape. The music is him singing with acoustic guitar and it is indescribably weird, and not at all accessible music. It barely even is music. Here is a sample of his 1978 album:

  . He has hundreds of hours of music like this.

• He continues to records tape of himself playing this atonal, creepy, and barely even music "songs" over the course of many, many, many, albums in the coming decades. His identity is never revealed, even when the tapes start getting an ironic undergrounds following. Eg. DJs would phone up the 'company' associated with his self-released tapes (his home phone) and he'd identify himself as a representative of Jandek, not the artist himself. This is despite everyone knowing this music is definitely produced and released by one guy at the very most.

• he's kind of a music nerd/outsider art trivia questions - Kurt Cobain talks about his music in interviews for example - but the vast majority of people don't and never would listen to his music let alone enjoy it.

• in the 2000s, people start to realise Jandek is some 60/70 year old dude in Texas and Jandek stops denying it so strongly. He ends up being invited to play live for the first time and is captured on film (he never clarifies directly, but the guy in these concerts is a dude named Sterling Smith). Live concert from 2004:

Anyway that's the most necessary background, onto the wikipedia article.

For most of it's life, the Wiki article for Jandek has been similar to any article for a niche interest - way, way too long and detailed for something such a small number of people know about. I remember it as recently as a few years ago going into detail of every major attempt to unmask Jandek, listing all of his hundreds of tapes and album, music criticism, and then lists of post-2000 public appearences. The wiki page had theories, mysteries, rabbit-holes within itself. It was terrible as ana encyclopaedia but interesting as a story re some random guy who can't sign or play guitar well getting mysteriously semi-famous. If you go into the article's historical edits you can see the unwieldy version of the page back then: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jandek&oldid=976435895

This is worth noting because the only truly compelling thing about Jandek is the context - who is this guy, where did he come from? Which is what the wiki article leant into. No one was a 'fan' of Jandek, unironically, or listened to his music for the love of the sound. There's simply no way. People were inviting him to perform live because then they could say they performed with the mysterious Jandek, and people went to his shows for the same reason. The wiki article was microcosm of this very state of being.

So what happens? Some uppity Wiki editor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ILIL) posts this on the article's talk page in 2021:

>This article is a feature-length novel of unsourced claims and needs to be blown up. I would do it myself but I don't want to bother with the inevitable edit wars. People close to the subject seem to be carefully watching this page like a hawk.

When someone points out that the reason Jandek is notable is the talk and mystery around him -- thus that probably needs to figure into the article somehow, ILIL disagrees strongly.

>I'll have to respectfully disagree with your pov. I enjoy using Wikipedia for the purposes that it was designed for, which is to gather a quick summary of what news media, books, and articles have published about a given subject. Just the facts, please. Geeky trivia, hearsay, rumors, and crowdsourced press releases is the domain of YouTube video essays, blogs, and "fandom" Wikis. Everything has its time and place.

The autism runs so deep on Wikipedia that the editors truly can't comprehend how most humans absorb information. The above statement is true re: an article about a scientific theorem. It's not how people engage with entertainment. Nonetheless, soon after, the article is wittled down to two sections - a very brief introduction where a music publication is quoted calling Jandek "mysterious" with no other context (because that would be editorialising), a handful of sentences with chronology of his first release and later live shows, and maybe two quotes re: his lack of widely known identity. His strange lack of musical talent is barely mentioned with a statement saying: "an idiosyncratic and frequently atonal form of folk and blues music,". If you think this captures the music i linked to in this post, you're a moron.

Someone who, say, hears someone talking about Jandek and wants to know what the big deals searches up this article and comes away with more questions - why so much mystery around what is apparently a fairly normal blues singer from the 70s? Unless they dig through old versions of this article they'll never know.

In one very minor article, the core issue of Wikipedia is summarised: in a fight between normies and autism, the autism is more powerful.

For the drama, go into the article's edit history and see warring editors making changes to the article post-2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jandek&action=history