Barbershop Wiki Project:About

The Barbershop Wiki Project is a place to create, store, and research information related to Barbershop harmony. This site was created on September 24, 2008 by Casey Parsons. Since then, fans of close-harmony singing from around the world have made 108,732 edits to 2,774 pages.

Because it's very difficult to keep track of who's saying what in an "everyone can edit everything" environment, it is not well suited for engaging in discussions. For that we recommend places like the Harmonet or Facebook.

Any page can be edited, including this one!

Need help?

Style and Formatting

General

• This is a wiki, not a promo venue. We're trying to maintain neutrality here. Think Joe Friday: "Just the facts, ma'am." See the Other Wiki for more explanation.
• Editors come and go, but the wiki is forever. Please ensure that anything you write will still be true in five or ten years. Words like "recently, are now, will soon" grow stale over time.
• Unless the page clearly calls for it (e.g., list of chapters) please limit your external links, and confine them to the "External links" section.
• Try to minimize the number of blue words in each link.
• When in doubt, look at several similar pages for formatting and editorial style. AIC pages generally have more leeway, out of respect for historian Grady Kerr, who wrote most of them himself.
• If all else fails, ask Casey (founder) or Stu (primary editor).

External Links

Please keep them few, relevant, and confined to the External Links section.

Preferred formats:

• [http://example.com Official website]
• SiteName: [http://example.com Reference]

Tables

• To list a group's contest results over several years, please follow this example.
  1. class="contesttable"
  2. exclamation mark opening the YEAR-rows, which puts the RESULTS in bold
  3. year-links only when they actually competed
  4. ten years per row, making for easy navigation.
     • Flexible. "Decades" can start anywhere, or extend farther, if it makes sense in context.
• Recordings and Discographies: you can find examples of the two major schools of thought here and here.
  1. class="wikitable"
  2. exclamation mark opening rows in bold
  3. tracks in a column
     • Some pages list tracks, some don't. No consensus yet.

Templates

• If an existing template needs updating, go right ahead!
• If you feel the need to create a new template, please test it in your own sandbox first.
• If you want to try something fancy, please run your idea and proof-of-concept past the major contributors first. We may know an easier way to do it.