Resource of the Week: LyricWiki
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
We're not going to bog you down with a "scholarly" resource this week. In most places, the weather is just too nice for you to stay indoors and stare at a computer screen. Get out, get active, take your iPod...
Everybody likes music. We may not all like the same music, and we may prefer different types of music at different times and in different places. It's always a popular topic of discussion, and music lyrics are a rich source of meaningful quotations. But when you go out onto the Net and look for lyrics, many of the sites that provide them also bombard you with pop-up ads, spyware and other obnoxious web fungus.
LyricWiki is a free site which is a single source where anyone can go to get reliable lyrics for any song from any artist without being hammered by invasive ads. Music is a large part of many people's lives, and we feel there should be a place where people can go to just look up the lyrics to songs. No hassles.
LyricWiki is the most comprehensive site ever created for lyrics. Through automated scripts, public domain lyrics were found across the internet and reliable results were mined and formatted to provide the base of more than 200,000 songs that started the site off.
While the site runs on a version of MediaWiki software, it is not part of the Wikimedia Foundation. Traditional wiki principals apply here, however; contributors worldwide are welcome, and users are asked to keep an eye out for typos, vandalism, etc. While monetary donations are accepted, it basically runs as a free service via the generosity of MotiveForce LLC, a software company. There are a few unobtrusive text ads, but that is pretty much it as far as commercialism goes here.
Navigation is super-easy. You can browse for lyrics by artist, album, song title, genre, hometown, label, or language. (The site is also available in French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Swedish.) Or you can use the simple text search engine, which offers interesting possibilities -- e.g., I found 16 songs that contain the word "woodpecker" in their lyrics.
Sometimes, on the individual song, artist, etc., pages, you'll find a link to a related article in Wikipedia, an audio recording or a music video on YouTube. If you like, you can browse all the songs with links to audio or video.
A "Song of the Day" is featured in the upper righthand corner. These are nominated by users and put into a queue; the top one is automatically plucked and added to the front page each day. Ditto for the mid-page "Album of the Week" feature. Cool.
And for added convenience, if you are a Firefox or Netscape user, you'll find links to LyricWiki search plugins underneath the sponsors window on the lefthand side of the home page.
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