Well, the great Myspace experiment is over. I really can’t be bothered with the thing. To be honest, the main problem is the interface. It doesn’t just suck, it really fucking sucks big hairy balls. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by web services that take their user interface seriously but there’s no way I can be arsed to get involved with the Myspace world. My profile as been stripped down and I’m outa there.

So why’s it so astoundingly popular? To be honest, I don’t really know. There’s no doubt an element of critical mass, where once enough of your friends are involved you have to get involved yourself no matter how much hard work it is, but I do wonder if it’s just that people don’t know any better. That’s not to say they’re stupid. They just think services like Myspace are the normal way to do things on the web. I’m reminded of the gasps of amazement of people when I show them Google Maps and edit the details of my photos in Flickr directly on the page, or when I demonstrate to them how to open pages in tabs in Firefox or how this RSS feeds thingy actually works. Okay, maybe gasps is pushing it a bit, but remember most people out there are using Internet Explorer to access their Hotmail accounts. For them stuff like Myspace is perfectly fine and dandy because it gets the job done.

But for me, nah. No offence but I have better things to do.

And one of them is to finally get involved with Wikipedia! You’ll hopefully have noticed I tend to link to this wonder of our internet age a fair bit, usually when I want to have something explained or defined. In brief, it’s a web-based encyclopedia which anyone, and I mean anyone, can edit. If this sounds like a terrible idea that’s bound to go wrong, all revisions are stored so that if someone does something stupid it can be rolled back. Amazingly it works really really well with Wikipedians carefully crafting entries and adding to or editing what others have created. The best way to really understand how Wikipedia works is to watch Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Movie.

I’d been putting off getting involved because it seemed like quite a big deal to write stuff there. I rely on Wikipedia (with caution of course) for a lot of things so the idea that my ill-founded knowledge might be relied on by others seemed a bit of a dangerous thing. Plus once you start writing something you really have to be certain about your facts. That requires research and citation, which seems like a lot of hard work.

However, while surfing around some British comics pages for a BugPowder post on Wikipedia I noticed that my BugPowder posting colleague Steve Block had a profile there and had been active for a few months. Now I didn’t think “Hell, if Steve can do this then it can’t be that hard”, perish the thought - it was more that I’d never knowingly known anyone involved in Wikipedia before, and now here was a buddy.

So with some trepidation, and after reading all the guidelines and help pages, I started putting together my first page. I think it’s probably quite typical of people’s first forays in that it’s just a big list of Comics Journal Interviews. I have a pretty large, but by no means complete, collection of The Comics Journal and its interviews are always essential reading. However, there doesn’t really exist a decent index for it anywhere. Now I have one, not just for myself but for anyone else to use and, hopefully, add to. A useful resource, certainly, and the interview subjects are all linked to their respective Wiki pages, but not it’s really “encyclopedic” is it.

Looking through the pages Steve had created I noticed he’d started one for Escape Magazine, one of the more important comics anthologies from the 1980s of which I know a fair bit and have most of the issues. Here’s what it looked like before I got to it and here’s what it looked like when I’d added to it. (It’ll no doubt change in the future so here’s what it looks like right this second).

I know about this stuff. I’ve spent the last 15 years involved with it in various degrees and have a wealth of resources to back me up (those Comics Journals for a start). Ever since Caption where I chaired a panel on the history of the UK small press, I’ve been wanting to get this stuff down. It’s not only interesting, it’s actually quite important. Or I think it’s important and I know a lot of other people think so too. And now here’s somewhere to do it.

What’s interesting is that having created a page that has some weight to it (and I haven’t finished it yet, there’s a lot more to come) I’ve given weight to the subjects that spin off it. For example, there’s now a need for pages for all the artists that were connected with Escape to exist because they have a context. Steve started me off by writing “stubs” for articles he thought should be there and in turn I’ll start other people off. It’s all quite wonderful really.

And, above all, Wikipedia is a standards-compliant site with a superb user interface that encourages you to interact with it. It even has a vibrant community. Myspace? What’s that then?