User:Mintwriter

Reflection on EAST0550:K-Pop Wikipedia Article Project

Project Overview

For EAST0550:K-Pop, one of the projects was to create or extend an article relating to Korean Pop culture, media or history on Wikipedia.

Project Motivation

I wanted to write an article on the Korean ballad style of music because of its widespread popularity in modern day Korea (you can reference the article for this one!). It is also my mother's favorite style of music. Her devotion to Winter Sonata and the love ballads that make up its official soundtrack influenced my childhood and made the playlist for all of our road trips for years. It was surprising to see that an article had not been created about it on Wikipedia and that there was little mention of it on all of the articles relating to music in South Korea. I tried to tie in what I knew from my childhood experience with what I learned from class into this article.

Project Struggles

What I found immediately, was that there is a disappointingly small amount of space in the Wikipedia community dedicated to the culture and history of Korean music. I have no idea how our professor was able to create such detailed and informative lectures. If I want to learn more about something, I usually Wiki it, but what I was discovering while doing this project was that there are few references I could use to build enough information for a throughly complete article. Many of my classmates were able to write articles regarding different bands/groups that were introduced in the class who had served as vital parts of the history of Korean music, because although our professor had introduced them - most of them were difficult to find on the internet. For me, the difficulty lay in finding reliable sources. There were only a handful of articles that I could choose from to reference in my project that were relevant to the questions that I wanted to answer. Specific answers, regarding further information on some of the singers and songs references in the articles themselves, were difficult to find. The university library and online scholarly search engines were extremely useful in finding obscure articles that may not be easily attainable at the local library, but were vital in getting the information necessary to write on my topic.

It was not helpful that the article Sentimental Ballad, had no mention of Korean ballad song style and focused its attention on Western style music. While it is true, and reflected in my research, that Korean ballad music stems from Western influences, the popularity and ubiquity of the ballad style in Korean media that has allowed for the evolution of this genre to have an aspect that is unique to the Korean experience (alluding to the cultural aspects of the song genre uses in widely popular Korean dramas and their place in Korean popular culture while recognizing the influence of these media products on other East Asian and Southeast Asian communities).

Project Results

For my contribution to Wikipedia, I added the "Ballad" section to the article Music of South Korea and created the article Korean Ballad. The "Ballad" section introduces the music genre with a short history and a reference to its popularity in modern Korean media. The Korean Ballad article comprises of an introduction into it's history and music style, and then continues into it's mixture with other genres such as Trot, Pop, Rock, and Folk. To complete this article, I worked with my peers both in the classroom and online - including the Wikipedia community. Through peer review, my article was reviewed and edited while the online Wikipedia community regulated my article and what was posted on it (mostly by removing images which were not in the free domain).

Project Thoughts

I was worried - and still am, given that someone had renamed my article to the lowercase "Korean ballad" - that my words would be changed or that most of my article would be absorbed into something else. Moreover, I'm worried that my article is not efficient in the sense that within the whole network of Korea-related articles in Wikipedia there might be a better organization for it that I cannot conceive of at the moment. Hopefully, there will be more articles that link and reference to one another that will eventually lead to the article that I have written. And by then, I hope that other people have added what they know to it.

In the end I, like most other Wikipedia editors, feel like there is a lot more work to be done. I could spend weeks detailing the different singers who contributed to the modern era of Korean Ballad songs, and even longer writing their individual biography and discography pages. On top of that, a detailed history of the relationship between ballad music and the other components of Korean music would be a page with multiple sub-pages on its own. Reflecting on the difficulties I had while writing the article, I am proud of the work I completed. To build on it, I think there would be a lot value in expanding to another article that elaborates on the historical, commercial, and cultural relationship between Korean dramas and their ballad song themes.