Genius Power Hour: Knowledge Projects!

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Hey everyone, happy Monday! Vinyl here. This week's Power Hour is based on something very important to me that I do fairly often on the site: Knowledge Projects! Basically, the goal is to fix up an artist's discography, one tate at a time.

Sound fun? Here are some ways to get involved:

• Propose your own Knowledge Project for an album you love. See an example announcement here.
• Participate in an existing Knowledge Project, like the one I'm leading for My Chemical Romance's Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge.
• Annotate some lyrics from your favorite artists' past work that haven't been explained yet.
• Edit or propose edits to existing annotations to reflect the site's current standards and include information that may not have been available when the tate was created.
• Help spread the word about different Knowledge Projects to make sure they get the attention they deserve! This is especially important for those in less-popular genres.

Best Practices: (will update as we go)

• Take advantage of any available resources (see below).
• If you want to help out with an existing Knowledge Project but aren't familiar with the artist, ask either the project leader or a top scholar for some pointers.
• Interviews are a definite staple, but you might have trouble finding one that discusses multiple tracks. What I do is google "[artist name] [song name] interview," and sometimes I'll find an interview that has a question or two about the song I'm working on.

Resources:

• If a user has created an Artist Archive for the artist you're working on, use it!
• Wikipedia is often frowned upon as a resource, but there will likely be a multitude of information and more "citable" sources linked throughout the page.
• Artists sometimes do what's called track-by-track commentary, where they discuss each song on an album. If the artist you're working on has done one, it should be easy to find by googling either "[artist/album name] track-by-track" OR "[artist/album name] commentary" and get these kinds of results. Try a bit of both and see what comes up!
• There may be song/album information on an artist's website, so it never hurts to check.
• Interviews are a definite staple, but you might have trouble finding one that discusses multiple tracks. What I do is google "[artist name] [song name] interview," and sometimes I'll find an interview that has a question or two about the song I'm working on.

Other:

• I'm gonna be super corny here and quote Wonder Pets: "What's gonna work? Teamwork!" Cleaning up an artist on your own isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the job will go so much faster if others are helping you. If you're working on an artist not many other users listen to, find users within the same genre that might want to lend you a hand.
• Don't be afraid to help fix up an artist you don't listen to — you might find your new favorite song!
• If you start a new Knowledge Project, post about it below so anyone interested can check it out!

Have fun geniuses!

cc: @genius-editorial-board @pop-genius @rap-genius @rock-genius @country-genius

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