User:Milkunderwood

About myself:

First, I consider myself to be a user rather than an "editor" of Wikipedia. Second, I am not a musician - I can't read music, and play no instrument at all, even badly. My only "instruments" are a CD player and an antique turntable.

Rather I am attempting to catalog a fairly large collection of recordings, mostly of classical music, some of which are my own. Nearly all of my posts here are either questions or comments on talk pages, although I have made a very few corrections or other changes to existing articles. I have no institutional affiliation, am not competent at independent research, and I depend almost exclusively on what I can find here at Wikipedia, or in some cases at IMSLP [1]. I do have at hand a very few, and uniformly old, basic reference books such as a Schwann catalog, a Penguin Guide and the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music. And I'm very slowly and clumsily trying to find my way through Wikipedia's thicket of procedures, styles, and methods. My Wikipedia nom de plume is taken from my very first edits here, at the article Under Milk Wood.

As a user I hold a few strong beliefs concerning Wikipedia's organization, and have argued for them,

• that classical music is different in many important respects from popular music, and that with very few exceptions such as the article on The Goldberg Variations (Gould album), articles on specific recordings of classical music are not only unhelpful to users but also create confusing clutter in Searchbox searches, this being particularly true of compilation albums;
• that such recordings are best handled by being listed - and annotated where appropriate - in discographies under specific notable performers, and/or compositions;
• that the essential date information to be provided is that of the original recording, with perhaps only incidentally a disc's date of issue by its publisher also being provided. A striking example of what I consider to be a particularly poorly designed discography is the currently existing Arthur Rubinstein discography. I have begun, but will probably not continue to work on, what I think is a much more useful format for a Rubinstein discography in my sandbox Rubinstein.

And I very much appreciate all the generous help I've always received here from more experienced editors, and musicians.

Milkunderwood (talk) 20:48, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

(Also: User:Milkunderwood/sandbox Hovhaness; User:Milkunderwood/sandbox BSQ Recordings)

I want to add that I've gradually developed a philosophy of Wikipedia, which is that not everyone coming here looking for information is an expert in editors' various fields. More, and clearer, information is better than less. Don't assume that your terminology is universally comprehended. Don't make people have to struggle to find what they're looking for. Why make it hard for them? Here's a delicious bit of irony that I've stolen from a post by User:Ravpapa: Remember, the reader is the enemy. It's just something for each of us to think about. Milkunderwood (talk) 07:54, 6 December 2011 (UTC)