Dabbling my toes in the ocean that is Wikipedia...

While I use Wikipedia regularly to check dates, opus numbers for pieces, correct titles and countless other bits of information I need for my work but can’t quite be bothered actually remembering, up until this point I have never edited a Wikipedia article and I had no idea what was involved in doing so. When I saw we had the option this week of doing just that, I figured it was time to get over my hesitation and explore the process.

            Before totally committing to the idea, I wanted to make sure that I felt there was someplace that I could actually contribute something useful. I looked at the entries for some of the composers I know well – Elgar, Vaughan Williams, among others – and topics I deal with, like the English Musical Renaissance. These were long and complex articles, and most of the ones I looked at I felt had been well-written and well-vetted. I simply didn’t see any obvious lacunae, and thought that any contribution would be more political/ideological on my part than substantive. There is a general sense in academic musicology that it is part of our “job” to oversee things like Wikipedia entries, and there seems to be a lot of contribution by my colleagues towards policing things that fall within our realm of expertise.

            Eventually I got around to looking at the entry on the English Masque – a genre I know well and from which I drew case studies for my dissertation/monograph -  and found that there really was nothing there drawing attention to the fact that composers continued to write masques during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and then there was an odd mention of two 20^th century masques by Vaughan Williams and Lambert. I thought I could easily add a paragraph or two, just mentioning that there is more history there to explore.

            The process of creating an account was ominously easy; the choice of a username ‘scholargardener’ and a password granted me almost universal ability to edit anything I wanted. Once I had created my account, Wikipedia suggested I participate in the mundane work of a Wiki of this size by suggesting that I offer to do editing on articles they recommended by improving clarity, adding links, or fixing spelling and grammar. I appreciate that people need to do these things for the system to work, but I was on a mission.

            I chose to return to the Masque entry page, where I had new links and choices on the top I had never seen before. I had a new notification, welcoming me to Wikipedia and giving me a link to control my settings, which I had a quick look at. I had a link for preferences, a “watchlist”, and a “contributions list,” and an edit and history tab.

            I figured the place to start was with the “history” of the article, since I was curious what kinds of edits had been done to the article. I have to say, my expectations were that the article would have been written quite a while ago, and that there would have been a limited number of edits done by a very limited number of editors. I was quite surprised, then, to see a very long list of edits spread over a long period of time. The most recent edits were done in early September, and there were quite a few edits done in May and June, but going back several years. I wonder if the article didn’t come up as one of the “recommended for editing” list, since most of the edits seemed to be about creating links and importing citations. Again, I was surprised at the number of people who had worked on the entry, and relatively few of them had worked on it repeatedly.

            At one point the article had been vandalized, and had been fixed; I didn’t quite get exactly what had happened. And there were some substantive changes and comments made that things needed supporting citation. None of it seemed particularly fractious; this obviously was not a forum for the latest debates on aspect of the English masque. One feature I found interesting is that you could question an editor about a particular point or a particular change. Editing was frequently undone as well!

            I then went back to the entry page and clicked the edit button. I scrolled down to the end, where I was going to insert some of my own material. The original section looked like this:

While no longer popular, there are later examples of the masque. In the 20th century, [[Ralph Vaughan Williams]] wrote ''[[Job, a masque for dancing]]'' which premiered in 1930, although the work is closer to a [[ballet]] than a masque as it was originally understood. His designating it a masque was to indicate that the modern [[choreography]] typical when he wrote the piece would not be suitable.

[[Constant Lambert]] also wrote a piece he called a masque, ''Summer's Last Will and Testament'', for orchestra, chorus and baritone. His title he took from [[Thomas Nash]], whose masque<ref>It was a "comedy" when it was printed, in 1600 as ''A Pleasant Comedie, call'd Summers Last will and Testament''<!--correct as entered-->, but, as a character announces, "nay, 'tis no Play neither, but a show." With Nash's stage direction ''"Enter Summer, leaning on Autumn's and Winter's shoulders, and attended on with a train of Satyrs and wood-Nymphs, singing: [[Vertumnus]] also following him"'' we are recognizably in the world of Masque.</ref> was probably first presented before the [[Archbishop of Canterbury]], perhaps at his London seat, [[Lambeth Palace]], in 1592.

It took me a few minutes to figure out what the characters meant and the appropriate Wikipedia marking indications to use when, eventually figuring out how to do italics and how to create links to other entries. In the end, I decided on two things. First, I decided as much as possible not to change what someone else had written, and instead to try to incorporate their material. So the slightly odd, tacked on paragraphs about Job and Summer’s Last Will and Testament I left in, even though I might have talked more generally about VW and Lambert if I was starting the entry from scratch. Second, I decided not to include citations. This was such a basic, brief, and general account of the masque during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, I thought citations would be overkill and overly specific for the information contained. I didn’t want to self-cite, and I didn’t want to open a can of worms by having to offer long lists of citations for general information. It will be interesting to see if I get queried about that in the future!

In the end, here is the new version of that section of the entry:

Later Masques

While the masque was no longer as popular as it was at its height in the 17th Century, there are many later examples of the masque. During the late 17th century, English semi-operas by composers such as Henry Purcell had masque scenes inset between the acts of the play proper. In the 18th century, William Boyce and Thomas Arne, among other composers, continued to utilize the masque genre mostly as an occasional piece, and the genre became increasingly associated with patriotic topics. There are isolated examples throughout the first half of the 19th century.

With the renaissance of English musical composition during the late 19th and early 20th century (the so-called English Musical Renaissance), English composers turned to the masque as a way of connecting to a genuinely English musical-dramatic form in their attempts to build a historically-informed national musical style for England. Examples include those by Arthur Sullivan, George Macfarren, and even Edward Elgar, whose imperialistic Crown of India was the central feature at the London Coliseum in 1912. Masques also became common as scenes in operettas and musical theatre works set during the Elizabethan period.

In the 20th century, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote several masques, including his masterpiece in the genre, Job, a masque for dancing which premiered in 1930, although the work is closer to a ballet than a masque as it was originally understood. His designating it a masque was to indicate that the modern choreography typical when he wrote the piece would not be suitable.

 Constant Lambert also wrote a piece he called a masque, Summer's Last Will and Testament, for orchestra, chorus and baritone. His title he took from Thomas Nash, whose masque^[3] was probably first presented before the Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps at his London seat, Lambeth Palace, in 1592.

When I was finished, I went and checked out the “Watchlist” tab in my commands above, and noted that the masque article was now on my watchlist. I provided an email address, which I am presuming means that I will be notified if anyone edits the entry in the coming weeks. And as a little reward for my efforts, I had my first entries there for me to see on my “Contributions” list!

            I’m glad I took the opportunity to try this out and look behind the scenes a bit. I have a much better understanding of how the process works now, and perhaps an even more heightened sense of anxiety about how fraught the process can be. It is so incredibly easy to edit anything, and things need to be aggressively policed for misinformation not to happen. It all comes down to how much people care, doesn’t it?

Find the entry at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masque