User:Cubanabop

I've been a college instructor (ethnomusicology) for many years, and now a program coordinator for an interdisciplinary program for first-year college students. I am a big fan of the idea of a democratically maintained encyclopedia and I want to be a part of helping make sure that any information available through Wikipedia is valid and useful.

I create class projects that allow students to learn how to do ethical and thorough research on a topic and how to properly cite sources, but more and more I've been trying to find ways for them to learn how to be part of the public feedback loop that is inherent in any kind of ethnographic study of music [or, indeed, of anything!] so I've been having them update or create Wikipedia pages in lieu of a traditional research paper. We've worked on project to update existing musical instrument stubs, and are currently working to update content in Wikipedia celebrating musicians who do activist work. I also use this space for sandbox practice for students describing cross-functional musical terms and properly citing sources of credible information about living musicians. Our goal is to assist meeting Wikipedia's internal standards, while also strengthening, in real-world terms, the credibility of public discourses about music.

I also enjoy participating in public Wikiprojects, like Meetup/ArtAndFeminism, or making sure biographies of living musicians are well-sourced and don't read like promotional material.