Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2014 June 11

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June 11

musical instruments

I've just spent 15 minutes or more looking up Armenian musical instruments in oder to get a sound byte of a particular instrument [ in this case it turns out to be the Duduk]. Nowhere, on any page I tried, was such a thing available. I'll bet I should have tried YouTube or even Amazon. Your treatment of the general subject reminds me of the old joke about six blind men each describing the elephant they were touching. While I am impressed with the amount of information supplied, nowhere was there available a link [is that the word?] to a simple sound byte of the instrument in question. This is not the first time I've had this overdone method of delivering info defeat my efforts. I find I'm not using what should be the single most important reference work on the planet. My own library could probably come close to providing the info found in your pages, but like this site, apparently, it does not have sound capabilities . This seems incredibly dumb in this day & age, and unless you become MUCH more user-friendly you are likely to wonder why your site, so promising, does not grow in use and importance; instead becoming a side-water of lost potential.DptOpCat3 (talk) 18:58, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Sorry. Wikipedia is entirely written by volunteers. We don't have a paid staff researching all these topics, it is only written by people exactly like you who simply wanted to help out. If the fact that Wikipedia doesn't have a sound bite of an obscure Armenian instrument (which no one else does, based on your own admittance of trying to find it) is what makes you believe that Wikipedia is worthless, then there's nothing anyone here can do to convince you otherwise, because that's a pretty lousy way to form a lasting opinion of a rather expansive website. If you want to pitch in and help out, your help is needed as well. The only reason ANYTHING (and I mean everything: every single word of every single article on the whole website. Even the really good articles) exists at Wikipedia is because someone saw that Wikipedia was lacking in information, and decided to add it. That is, random people who were surfing the internet decided to add something. Since you seem to fit that bill, we welcome your work! --Jayron32 19:52, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

I'm in full agreement with Jayron. Basing your assessment of our user friendliness (!) on the existence or not of a sound bite of an obscure Armenian musical instrument that not one person in 100,000 in the English-speaking world would ever even have heard of, let alone know the first thing about - and this is the English Wikipedia we have here, by the way - would make those six blind men seem rather astute by comparison. I fully understand your frustration, but your expectations are somewhat out of kilter with reality. Nowhere has Wikipedia ever claimed to have extremely detailed information on any conceivable topic, obscure or otherwise, chosen at random (other people may well make such claims, but Wikipedia itself does not, and this would be a perfect counterexample). But if you do what Jayron suggests, we may well soon have a sound bite of the duduk, which would suddenly render us highly user-friendly and give those legions of other duduk researchers a pleasant surprise. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:27, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

The article "Duduk" (version of 21:21, 30 May 2014) has a link to a recording of duduk music. If you scroll down (or click down from the table of contents), you can see, at the right-hand side of the page, a link to a recording in a .ogg file. (I used "a", not "an", before "dot-oh-gee-gee".)

—Wavelength (talk) 23:31, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

How much sound can you cram into one byte? —Tamfang (talk) 21:23, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

A duduk recording (3 minutes, 7.7 MBytes) has been available as a link in the article since early 2011. Your critique seems based on poor visual acuity. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 15:43, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

U.S. Open (golf)

I'm trying to figure out why the logo for this year's U.S. Open looks familiar. File:2014USOpenLogo.svg It resembles a painting of a farmer with a broad hat and a scythe, with the scythe replaced by a trophy. I'm thinking this is a play on a famous painting, but I can't find it in Google Images. Any ideas? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:53, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

It's a variation on the other U.S. open logos when it was held at Pinehurst. I don't know if there was an original inspiration, but look at 2005_U.S._Open_(golf) and 1999 U.S. Open (golf) and you'll see a theme. The boy in the bucket hat I believe comes from the logo of the Pinehurst Resort itself, see here. --Jayron32 00:20, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Concur, see [1]. Nanonic (talk) 06:38, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

And you can see the old ads from 1900-1910 here. Nanonic (talk) 06:46, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

And here is a photo of the statue of the kid at Pinehurst. Deor (talk) 13:49, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

It has come to me what the logo reminds me of: It's the logo for Simon & Schuster. Regarding that, what's up with this "media viewer" that has popped up in he last week or so? Is that something that changed on Wikipedia? Or is my PC doing it? Whatever it is, it's very annoying. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:38, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Go to the Appearance tab in your preferences, Bugs, and uncheck the "Enable Media Viewer" box under "Files". Yes, it's fairly new. Deor (talk) 21:22, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Done. Thank you! I always love it when they pull a fast one on us. I'm guessing the purpose of that option is to better enable viewing by smartphones and the like. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:21, 14 June 2014 (UTC)