Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Wikipedia Album Entries
Sometimes when I have been recording my old albums for eventual conversion to MP3 format I have looked up the group or artist on Wikipedia to see what their entry says about them. In many cases there's often little or nothing about their discography, especially for some the older and perhaps more obscure artists. So I have taken it upon myself to add album entries to Wikipedia for artists that are otherwise under-represented or for whom I happen to have a copy of something that hadn't been listed in a given discography.

In the past month or so, here's what I have added album-wise:

• Jonathan Winter's "The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters"
• Bernard Braden "Reads Stephen Leacock"
• Art Bears "The World As It Is Today"
• B.B. Gabor's eponymous album
• Rowan Atkinson's "Live in Belfast"
• Frank Tovey's "Snakes and Ladders"
• The Spoons "Stick Figure Neighbourhood" (album image only) and "Nova Heart / Symmetry 12" Single"
• Juluka's "Scatterlings"
• Blue Peter's "Radio Silence"

The old Spoons and Blue Peter material came from the local Ready Records label, for which there was no mention. Taking an old catalog listing from the early 80s I added an entry for that record label as well.

Getting the album covers can be a bit fiddly. Computer scanners are definitely not designed with a 12" square scanning in mind, so each of the albums requires at least two scanning passes, sometime four if there are design elements that were missed in the top or bottom sides. Drop them into the PhotoMerge function in PhotoShop, use the lasso and smudge tools to correct scratches or torn areas, and then downsample the images and resize it to roughly 500 pixels square so as to not run afoul of Fair Use policy when uploading the final .png image.

I usually try to discover if a contemporary CD release for these albums exist, and it is interesting to see how the tracks are occasionally shuffled, added to or even removed over the original vinyl LP release. Apparently the ordering of tracks on the (South African only?) CD of "Scatterlings" is considerably different than the Canadian LP I have, and was very surprised to find that an acoustic version of Frank Tovey/Fad Gadget's most popular song, "Collapsing New People" was present on my vinyl copy of his "Snakes and Ladders" album, but not on any subsequent re-release, even though several other tracks were added. There's a story there I don't know.

Trivia as opposed to truly encyclopedic knowledge? Definitely. But there's ample precedence already, and Wikipedia is arguably morphing well beyond the bounds of more typical online encyclopedias.

Besides, from my perspective it's a lark and an excuse to revisit my appreciation of older bands/artists. And it is interesting to see what other people come to add to the original entries over time.