Talk:Kero Kero Bonito

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A fact from Kero Kero Bonito appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 2 April 2015 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the British band Kero Kero Bonito found their vocalist through an online bulletin board for Japanese expatriates?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2015/April. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Kero Kero Bonito.

Wikipedia

History (conflict of interest - band member)

This edit request by an editor with a conflict of interest has now been answered.

Hi Wikipedians,

I'm a member of the subject of this article, and as such there is a wild conflict of interest when it comes to me suggesting changes, but there is a factual inaccuracy regarding the band's origin story in the History section:

"[Jamie Bulled and Gus Lobban] wanted to work with someone who could speak Japanese..."

This is not strictly true. The citations given for this information quote us discussing why we chose to work with Sarah Perry over other applicants and as far as I know, there has never been any claim by a member of Kero Kero Bonito that we were only seeking a collaborator proficient in Japanese.

More detailed accounts of the group's origins (made in response to the above information which I now realise the interviewers were pulling from our Wikipedia article) can be found in these interviews among others:

http://anthemmagazine.com/qa-with-kero-kero-bonito/ https://brightestyoungthings.com/articles/byt-interviews-kero-kero-bonito-2016

As corroborated by these interviews, the more accurate account is that several adverts for collaborators were posted on different websites including Gumtree. One, posted by a Japanese friend of ours, was on a Japanese expat bulletin board, MixB, which is the advert that Sarah responded to.

I support Wikipedia's mission and understand how pointless it would be if public figures wrote their own biographies, especially when they've perpetrated suspect behaviour. However, whether we want it to be true or not, I can't confidently say that Wikipedia's current version of KKB history is correct. The inference made by the article doesn't quite tally with the full story behind the band's formation.

Thanks everyone for working on a KKB Wikipedia article - it still blows my mind that it exists. Stevensdl808 (talk) 20:08, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Reply

The source of that claim statement: "I think we wanted to do something with someone who could speak Japanese, because the sound of that language really appealed to us,” Gus pauses to think. “But really it would have been really difficult to do something with someone who didn’t speak English. Sarah meant we had both.”^[1] The claim in the article states "They wanted to work with someone who could speak Japanese." You're saying that this "isn't strictly true". But the quotation and the claim are not strict statements — they're conditional ones, in that one of their conditions was that the person speak Japanese while the second condition indicated from the source that they should also speak English. I can change the claim statement to indiciate both, if you'd like. Please advise. Spintendo 21:36, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ "Going Global with Kero Kero Bonito - Features - Impose Magazine". Impose Magazine. 16 September 2014.

Yes I see what you're saying. The conditionality of the Impose quote is ambiguous - consider how its meaning would differ were it in response to the questions "what were you looking for in a collaborator?" or "why did you select a Japanese-speaking applicant?". The Impose writer does not qualify this; the statement could mean:

"…we wanted to do something with someone who could speak Japanese [in general] because…"

or

"…we wanted to do something with someone [who responded to an advert we posted] who could speak Japanese because…".

Was it a condition of any collaboration with Gus and Jamie or just a condition of Sarah Midori Perry's collaboration with Gus and Jamie? The difference completely changes the nature of the band's formation. KKB's history on Wikipedia is subject to the ambiguity of this quote, which seems odd given that it concerns a biographical detail clarified by other sources.

By placing the text "They wanted to work with someone who could speak Japanese" at the beginning of the band history, readers of the article undoubtedly infer not just that a collaboration with Sarah was pursued on the basis of her bilingualism, as sources certainly state, but that Gus and Jamie were specifically seeking Japanese speakers, which is directly contradicted by several sources (like those cited in my original post).

Fair enough if it's the reader's choice to take this from a referenced statement, but it's certainly a history perpetuated by the article in its current form and, as aforementioned, it isn't fact.

(Edited - wasn't signed in!)

Stevensdl808 (talk) 12:54, 28 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Side projects by a band member - do they belong in this article?

Do Lobban's and Bulled's side projects belong on this page? They seem extraneous to me, since it's a page about the band, rather than about him. Balle010 (talk) 16:54, 14 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

[1] "Going Global with Kero Kero Bonito - Features - Impose Magazine". Impose Magazine. 16 September 2014.

[1]