Xenharmonic Wiki:What are this wiki's strengths and weaknesses?

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The Xenharmonic Wiki has a somewhat unique model among scholarly and educational resources, which gives it unique strengths and weaknesses.

It inherits many features from Wikipedia:

However it has some key differences:

  • Narrower focus (‘musical tuning’ instead of ‘the entirety of human knowledge’)
  • Original research is allowed
  • Evidence standards, while they do still exist, are much less strict than Wikipedia
  • There are no notability standards, you can write about any tuning-related topic no matter how obscure

These differences have softened a little since 2023. Since then, any terms coined in original research are to be marked with the "idiosyncratic" tag, and any pages with non-notable subject matters are to be marked with the "novelty" box.

Even still, Xen Wiki is a lot more lenient than Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't have disclaimer tags, it just fully deletes all original research and non-notable pages.

These differences may seem strange, but the 'background' section will shed light on why they are this way.

Background

Because musical tuning is a niche field, there isn't much money or fame in it, and as a result, no publishing infrastructure has been attracted to it or built up around it.

So, most musicians and theorists in the field only have the means to publish their works on personal websites, as video essays, or on Bandcamp/Soundcloud/YouTube, rather than in formal academic journals, printed books or labelled albums. This makes it impossible to run Xenharmonic Wiki the same way as Wikipedia, because when it comes to musical tuning, especially modern developments from the 1980s onwards, there simply are no resources that exist that meet Wikipedia’s guidelines for what is an acceptable source.

In addition, because the music tuning theory world is so small, it is often the case that the same people who are making new works of music or theory, are also the same people maintaining educational resources like the Xenharmonic Wiki. So Xenharmonic Wiki is unable to exclude original research the way Wikipedia does - if we did, there would be nothing on here, and all our music and our theories would never be shared with the world.

Strengths of Xen Wiki

Niche topics, new discoveries

Xenharmonic Wiki's greatest strength is its ability to document the absolute bleeding edge of music and theory. The newest and the most niche music, composers, scales and theories all make it on to the Xen Wiki, and most them will never make it onto any other similar resource like Wikipedia.

Xen Wiki documents scales that have only been used once or twice. It documents composers who get 20 listens per piece playing the Lumatone in their bedroom. It documents the pet theories of everyday people who have never been a professor. There is simply no other place that documents all this stuff.

Mathematical and technical records

Another strength of Xenharmonic Wiki is its huge repositories of technical tuning data:

Not to mention the big long pages of full mathematical proofs and rigorous definitions, defining tuning concepts in a degree of immense precision not seen anywhere else.

Xen Wiki is really the only place where you can find all that technical stuff. It's very useful for tinkering around with scales, to be able to have Xen Wiki open in another window with all the technical data of the tuning you're using just right there in front of you. If you're into the mathematical side of tuning, it's indispensible.

Category system

Xenharmonic Wiki's secret superpower is its category system. Start at Category:Contents and browse the nested subcategories to find absolutely anything. The categorization of pages is meticulous and makes exploring the wiki significantly easier.

Also, at the bottom of any page, you can see what categories that page belongs to. Click on one of the categories, and you can see all the other pages in that category. This is a great way to find relevant related pages when you are trying to research something.

Free as in speech

All content on the Xenharmonic Wiki, unless explicitly marked otherwise, is completely free to redistribute and modify.

This is particularly helpful, because it means that all those technical and mathematical repositories mentioned above are completely open to be copied and pasted in any other work, be it a piece of software, an academic paper, anything. This facilitates the free sharing of information and the collaborative development of ideas.

Free as in beer

Unlike a lot of academic journals or video essay channels with Patreon pages, Xenharmonic Wiki is completely free to access.

Anyone in the world on any device with internet access can view and download any and all content from the Xenharmonic Wiki at no financial cost.

This makes Xenharmonic Wiki accessible to readers from underprivileged backgrounds, readers who are young (high schoolers, college students) and readers who have other financial priorities (eg parenting, hobbies). It allows Xenharmonic Wiki to reach and help more people.

Backup copies

Frequent backups are made of the Xenharmonic Wiki - one full backup every single day, in multiple locations. If you're reading this, and you have hard disk storage to spare, we encourage you to download one of the backup copies and just stash it away on a couple hard drives at home, or on a cloud drive somewhere. Because, the more people who keep copies of the backups, the longer they will live on. Get your copy at: Xenharmonic Wiki:Backups.

Because of the extensive backup regime, the Xenharmonic Wiki is likely to be preserved for many years longer than any other online resource. All online resources are fleeting, but this wiki is one of the least fleeting. It is effective at preserving information for a long time, by internet standards.

Compatibility

Xenharmonic Wiki is built on MediaWiki, the industry standard format for wiki websites, used by Wikipedia, Fandom.com and most others. It uses the same back-end software and the same WikiText syntax as all those sites.

This has two big benefits:

  1. This makes it easy for maintainers of other sites to use content (both Lua modules and text content) from Xen Wiki, as importing it is relatively painless.
  2. This makes it comparatively easy for the Xen Wiki itself to migrate from one hosting provider to another, which it has already done successfully once in its history.

Low barrier to editor entry

As a wiki, anyone can edit the Xenharmonic Wiki. But as a small wiki, it has another advantage: there aren't many rules. A huge, sprawling wiki like Wikipedia has pages and pages of intimidating-looking rules, but Xen Wiki doesn't have that. It's pretty easy to jump in and start making major additions straight away.

In terms of rules, compared to Wikipedia's hundreds of pages, Xen Wiki has only three:

Xenharmonic Wiki also has fewer protected pages than Wikipedia. It has a few, but very much not many. Almost all of Xen Wiki's most prominent, critical pages are completely unrestricted and open to editing. This creates a sense of the wiki being very alive, a living breathing thing that can visibly change from month to month. This makes it exciting to a part of as a reader or editor, being able to watch it grow so much, so fast.

Weaknesses of Xen Wiki

Each one of these is something the Wiki is trying to improve upon, but is struggling due to a lack of volunteers with both the necessary expertise, and the necessary free time on their hands.

So, if you have the time, please sign up and contribute to helping us resolve one or more of these weaknesses.

Too many trees, not enough forest

The Xenharmonic Wiki has a general tendency where pages about advanced, esoteric concepts are written in impressive and helpful detail, while pages about the fundamental core figures or concepts in musical tuning are barebones stubs with just a sentence or two.

This makes the Xen Wiki a great resource for readers who are already familiar with those core concepts and are looking to explore the many facets and details of musical tuning. However it makes the Xen Wiki an often-frustrating resource for those trying to begin learning tuning theory in the first place.

Underrepresentation of traditional and folk tuning

It is likely that a big majority of microtonalists in the world today live in North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Indonesia. Despite this, of the over 18,000 pages on this wiki, the pages covering all those traditions combined number just 30. That makes most of the microtonal musicians in the world look like barely an afterthought.

One example of this shortcoming is that Arabic, Turkish and Iranian music are all smushed into the one page: Arabic, Turkish, Persian music. These are actually each their own very distinct musical traditions. Yes, they share common ancestry. But Pythagorean tuning, meantone, most well temperaments, and 12edo all share common ancestry, and are tuned much more similar to each other than Arabic, Turkish or Iranian music are to each other. So if each of those tunings mentioned above gets its own individual page, there's no reason why each of these regions of the world shouldn't have its own page.

Another example is the page "African music". That would be like having a page called "Eurasian music" which tries to cover the entirety of all European, Turkish, Arabic, Iranian, Indian, Chinese and Indonesian music in a few paragraphs. That's how diverse Africa is, and how insufficient it is for the whole continent to be compressed into one page.

Underrepresentation of historical theory

Musical tuning has been explored for as long as music itself has been around. Despite this, almost all of the Xen Wiki talks about music tunings of the past 50 years.

There are a few pages about early modern European tuning, from about 1500 onwards, though even those are mostly in need of expansion.

There are almost no pages at all though, about:

As you can see, that is most of history! This is a very big blind spot for the Wiki.

Lack of biographical and historical context

The Xenharmonic Wiki tends to be biased in favour of mathematics and practice, with little attention paid to the surrounding culture or people.

The Wiki documents thousands of tunings and scales with complete mathematical descriptions, complete enough for anybody to recreate the tuning or scale exactly.

However for almost every one of those tunings and scales, it says nothing about who described the tuning, when they described it, or why they described it. There were human beings behind all of these musical and mathematical structures, but the Wiki often does not tell the story of those human beings.

Lack of audio and visual aids

The Xenharmonic Wiki has a serious lack of illustrations and audio examples.

Given how complicated and dense musical tuning can sometimes be, illustrations could go a long way to helping readers understand. So the shortage of them is sorely felt.

It goes without saying that more audio examples would be useful on a wiki about music. The lack of them is sorely felt too.

Idiosyncratic terms

Because the Xenharmonic Wiki allows original research, and a huge portion of the Wiki is original research, many authors will casually use their own invented terminology for things, and mix and match it with widely-used terminology, making it unclear to the reader which is which. The reader may then go try to talk to someone using this invented term, or try to Google it, only to realise that nobody else understands or recognises the term.

The Wiki's editors are trying to improve this situation by seeking out any instances of idiosyncratic terms like these being used, and marking them with the 

{{idiosyncratic}}

tag. However, we haven't yet found and flagged every instance, many are still out there. Double check whether any new terms you see on the wiki are actually used outside of the wiki or not.

Unsourced claims

The 'citation needed' tag is not used often enough on the Xenharmonic Wiki. The tag doesn't always have to be used - it doesn't have to be used for original research, for example. But there are many pages on the wiki where authors make fact claims about things that are not their own original work, and yet they still provide no citations.

This is something to be careful with. If you read a fact claim on the wiki that you want to use, just double check it first to make sure the author didn't just make it up. (And if you see an unsourced claim on the wiki, don't be afraid to add the little 

{{Citation needed}}

to alert editors that it needs to be double checked).

Other languages (lack thereof)

The Xenharmonic Wiki is available in a few other languages, however these each contain only 5 to 50ish pages, which pales in comparison to the over 18,000 English pages.

None of the foreign-language versions of Xenharmonic Wiki are complete enough yet to be serious resources for learning about musical tuning. The wiki is in need of speakers of other languages to help improve this.

What other resources can supplement Xen Wiki?

These are resources that may lack some of the Xen Wiki's strengths, but have equally impressive and distinct strengths of their own.

They work great in combination with the Wiki, helping to cover its weak spots.

Tonalsoft

Accessible at tonalsoft.com, this site is highly extensive, including software, a blog, a journal, an archive of recordings, scores and similar resources, and an extensive, thorough encyclopedia penned by musical tuning legend Joseph Monzo.

The encylopedia is the highlight, with its intuitive navigation bar, extensive use of hypertext, enlightening visual aids and extensive coverage of every era of tuning theory.

Like Xenharmonic Wiki, it is completely free to access.

Huygens-Fokker Foundation

Accessible at huygens-fokker.org, this site is elegantly laid out and easy to navigate.

It does not cover the same niche topics as the Xen Wiki, but it does a better job of covering foundational topics compared to the Xen Wiki.

It specialises particularly in European and American musical tuning from the period 1600 to 1980.

Along with English, it includes a version of the site in Dutch (Nederlands). It also includes audio examples and an online radio station to listen to.

Like Xenharmonic Wiki, it is completely free to access.

Wikipedia

Access its page on Musical tuning, from which you can then navigate to the many other pages on musical tuning topics.

Wikipedia does not cover European or North American tuning theory - past or present - very well compared to Xen Wiki, Tonalsoft or Huygens-Fokker. It falls far short of all of them, in that area.

Wikipedia does, however, cover non-Western musical tuning much more extensively than any of the above sites. As a source for ethnomusicologists or musicians interested in non-Western musical tuning, Wikipedia is leagues above the others. The bibliography sections at the bottom of Wikipedia's musical tuning pages are particularly useful for studying the tuning systems of non-Western traditions.

Like Xenharmonic Wiki, it is completely free to access.

MaqamWorld

Accessible at maqamworld.com.

"MaqamWorld is an online resource dedicated to teaching the Arabic Maqam modal system, which is the foundation of traditional Arabic music. This website mainly covers music from the Eastern Mediterranean part of the Arab World (Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria), with a focus on the early to mid-twentieth century period."

Full site is available in English, Arabic, French, Italian, German, Greek, Spanish and Portuguese. Includes images and audio samples.

Like Xenharmonic Wiki, it is completely free to access.

Xenharmonic Alliance community

A community where you can ask questions about musical tuning:

More supplementary resources

Free
Paid

See also

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