ABBA On The Web - June 2006
Wikipedia is “the internet’s free encyclopedia”. Since it started in 2001, it has grown to include millions of pages in English plus 229 other languages – and continues expanding, adding more languages and pages.Each Wikipedia entry has links to other related pages, both specifically related to the topic and other more general information.
What makes Wikipedia different to most websites is that rather than being created by one person or a particular group, it is created by all users and can be updated by anyone. While this might sound like a recipe for disaster, with the potential that anyone could add all sorts of incorrect facts or stupid comments (or worse – vile comments and vulgarities), there are usually a number of people who act as guardians for particular pages, who will fix or remove obviously wrong information or crude comments that people might post.Of course, ABBA has a Wikipedia entry (in English), as well as many offshoot topics.
The primary ABBA page has a fairly detailed (and mostly accurate) biography, from the members’ early careers and right up to recent events. Within this, there are links to other pages on various topics – the individual members, other people, songs, albums, events, as well as general information on places, dates, and more.What makes Wikipedia unusually compelling is that at anytime, you can just go to a linked page to get more information about that particular topic. Want to know more about ‘Fernando’, Agnetha, the Eurovision Song Contest, the year 1982, what a logo is, the meaning of the word “tetrology”? Just click and go to the relevant page.
Also on the ABBA page there are featured articles on ABBA’s “Fashion and videos”, Trivia, and “See also” pages with further information.Other major ABBA entries on Wikipedia include pages for each of the members, many of their collaborators, most major hit singles, all the albums, ABBA – The Movie, ABBA discography, a list of unreleased songs, plus various lists that include ABBA. And yes, even the legendary ‘Just Like That’ has its own Wikipedia page! All can be found through links on the ABBA page, or just by searching for the particular topic.
As well as English, there are also ABBA pages in Afrikaans, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Esperanto, Faroese, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Min Nan, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese. Some of these pages are as detailed as the English page; some have different contents, while most have the bare minimum amount of information. These can all be accessed through links down the left side of the page, under the heading “in other languages”. [additional note: New Norwegian and Simple English were not included in the original article; since this article was written, Bahasa Indonesian, Bosnian, Korean, Persian, Serbo-Croatian, Sicilian, Romanian, Ukranian and Welsh language ABBA pages have been created]However, any of you can make a difference to these Wikipedia pages. Any visitor can add or update information. But please, if you do, make sure it’s accurate and can be verified. The more that people add, the more useful and informative the information on Wikipedia will become.
