Petra Wikipedia page project - Photos needed
Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 9:29 am
Hi all,
I'm Paul, and a onetime frequenter of this board, back in the early 2000s before Petra retired. I've been a Petra fan since I was a teenager, somewhere around 1996 (No Doubt was the first Petra tape I ever owned), and just for the record, like old and new Petra equally.
The Classic Petra reunion has and undoubtedly will continue to increase interest in Petra, both among its diehard fans and those who like or appreciate their music, or classic Christian rock generally. Given that, it seems like this is a good time to really get the band's Wikipedia page up to snuff. Like most Wikipedia pages, it has suffered from the incremental additions and edits performed over the last six or seven years. I've noted a few of the following problems:
* Stilted, awkward, unprofessional-sounding writing
* Poor/nonexistent sourcing for some facts
* Broken links for some citations
* Too much emphasis on post-peak Petra with little information on the creation and rise to popularity of the band.
* Failure to support statements on Petra's enormous influence on contemporary Christian music.
* Sound clips are unrepresentative of Petra's style and sound.
This isn't anyone's fault. Probably 80 percent of Wikipedia's pages have the same general problems. When 50 different people add information to a page, it's going to suffer from a lack of consistency. When the bulk of a band's career takes place before the Internet, it becomes much harder to find citable articles and interviews to develop its early history. Websites go under all the time, and truly gauging the influence of a band on other bands is difficult to do. It's all understandable, but that doesn't make these any less problematic for Petra's page.
I've unilaterally decided (because, hey, it's the Internet) to take on this project by editing/rewriting the page to 1. add more clarity and structure to the way the text reads, 2. add as much citable information as I can find about the band, particularly the band pre-1995, and 3., try to round up quotes from as many CCM bands as I can directly citing Petra as an influence.
I've started this already by rewriting the intro, style and early history sections. In the course of my research, I've found that CCM Magazine has done a decent job making their old articles available online, which is a treasure trove. There are a lot of gaps, but there are enough articles there to really help fill in the historical gaps. Also, Google News searches have turned up newspaper articles from Petra's first peak in the mid 1980s. I'll keep searching for sources that may be normally overlooked.
I think one of the best sources can be this board. If you know websites that have citable Petra information that I can use for the Wikipedia page, please post them here. If you know facts or data I haven't added, please post them here. I'd like to make this a repository for any and all info anyone here has on Petra. Obviously, anyone here can edit the page themselves and add that info, but the goal is to give the page a uniform feel, and it's difficult to do that with multiple people editing it.
I'll also post here any questions I have or any pieces of information I need sources for. For example, here is what I've run up against so far:
1. I know that Bob wanted to name Come and Join Us "God Gave Rock and Roll to You," but have no actual source for this other than a website that no longer exists.
2. I would like more info on why "Killing My Old Man" was dropped from CAJU, and for that matter more information about the controversy the song caused upon its eventual release.
3. There is a lot of talk about how controversial Petra was in the early days (protesters, sermons denouncing them, etc.), but very little actual examples I can find beyond Bob mentioning they would play at one church and discover the church across town was praying against them.
4. We all know "Why Should the Father Bother?" was Petra's first radio hit, and that's confirmed in numerous places, but I would love to have actual data on which chart and what position it reached, and for that matter, I'd love that info for every one of Petra's radio hits. I can infer some of this from articles on "The Coloring Song" and others, but the details would be great.
5. Album position and sales for every album. Again, I can extrapolate from some contemporary articles on how well Petra sold More Power to Ya, for example, but exact figures would be ideal.
I hope this thread will not only prove useful to this project, but provide a great catch-all resource for all of us and open us up to some new sources and historical information we may not have known or once known and forgotten. Thanks in advance for your help!
Paul
EDIT: There's also the question, raised below about the unofficial Facebook page, of how to deal with the Classic Petra reunion. On the one hand, it appears as if they are treating Classic Petra as its own band (given that John Schlitt apparently owns touring rights for the Petra name); on the other, it's a reunion of a long-standing lineup that has performed only as Petra, recording songs originally released under the Petra name, to which one of the performers apparently still owns the rights (at the very least, Bob isn't going to be paying John for recording "Grave Robber" on the new album, as an example). So in items such as the infobox describing "current members," the Classic Petra lineup is named, while the photo is of the lineup that retired in 2005 (which one could argue was less "Petra" than the one reuniting now). That seems like a good compromise, but I'm open to other suggestions, including the possibility of a separate Wikipedia page, though I'm cautious about doing that, given the potential for confusion.
I'm Paul, and a onetime frequenter of this board, back in the early 2000s before Petra retired. I've been a Petra fan since I was a teenager, somewhere around 1996 (No Doubt was the first Petra tape I ever owned), and just for the record, like old and new Petra equally.
The Classic Petra reunion has and undoubtedly will continue to increase interest in Petra, both among its diehard fans and those who like or appreciate their music, or classic Christian rock generally. Given that, it seems like this is a good time to really get the band's Wikipedia page up to snuff. Like most Wikipedia pages, it has suffered from the incremental additions and edits performed over the last six or seven years. I've noted a few of the following problems:
* Stilted, awkward, unprofessional-sounding writing
* Poor/nonexistent sourcing for some facts
* Broken links for some citations
* Too much emphasis on post-peak Petra with little information on the creation and rise to popularity of the band.
* Failure to support statements on Petra's enormous influence on contemporary Christian music.
* Sound clips are unrepresentative of Petra's style and sound.
This isn't anyone's fault. Probably 80 percent of Wikipedia's pages have the same general problems. When 50 different people add information to a page, it's going to suffer from a lack of consistency. When the bulk of a band's career takes place before the Internet, it becomes much harder to find citable articles and interviews to develop its early history. Websites go under all the time, and truly gauging the influence of a band on other bands is difficult to do. It's all understandable, but that doesn't make these any less problematic for Petra's page.
I've unilaterally decided (because, hey, it's the Internet) to take on this project by editing/rewriting the page to 1. add more clarity and structure to the way the text reads, 2. add as much citable information as I can find about the band, particularly the band pre-1995, and 3., try to round up quotes from as many CCM bands as I can directly citing Petra as an influence.
I've started this already by rewriting the intro, style and early history sections. In the course of my research, I've found that CCM Magazine has done a decent job making their old articles available online, which is a treasure trove. There are a lot of gaps, but there are enough articles there to really help fill in the historical gaps. Also, Google News searches have turned up newspaper articles from Petra's first peak in the mid 1980s. I'll keep searching for sources that may be normally overlooked.
I think one of the best sources can be this board. If you know websites that have citable Petra information that I can use for the Wikipedia page, please post them here. If you know facts or data I haven't added, please post them here. I'd like to make this a repository for any and all info anyone here has on Petra. Obviously, anyone here can edit the page themselves and add that info, but the goal is to give the page a uniform feel, and it's difficult to do that with multiple people editing it.
I'll also post here any questions I have or any pieces of information I need sources for. For example, here is what I've run up against so far:
1. I know that Bob wanted to name Come and Join Us "God Gave Rock and Roll to You," but have no actual source for this other than a website that no longer exists.
2. I would like more info on why "Killing My Old Man" was dropped from CAJU, and for that matter more information about the controversy the song caused upon its eventual release.
3. There is a lot of talk about how controversial Petra was in the early days (protesters, sermons denouncing them, etc.), but very little actual examples I can find beyond Bob mentioning they would play at one church and discover the church across town was praying against them.
4. We all know "Why Should the Father Bother?" was Petra's first radio hit, and that's confirmed in numerous places, but I would love to have actual data on which chart and what position it reached, and for that matter, I'd love that info for every one of Petra's radio hits. I can infer some of this from articles on "The Coloring Song" and others, but the details would be great.
5. Album position and sales for every album. Again, I can extrapolate from some contemporary articles on how well Petra sold More Power to Ya, for example, but exact figures would be ideal.
I hope this thread will not only prove useful to this project, but provide a great catch-all resource for all of us and open us up to some new sources and historical information we may not have known or once known and forgotten. Thanks in advance for your help!
Paul
EDIT: There's also the question, raised below about the unofficial Facebook page, of how to deal with the Classic Petra reunion. On the one hand, it appears as if they are treating Classic Petra as its own band (given that John Schlitt apparently owns touring rights for the Petra name); on the other, it's a reunion of a long-standing lineup that has performed only as Petra, recording songs originally released under the Petra name, to which one of the performers apparently still owns the rights (at the very least, Bob isn't going to be paying John for recording "Grave Robber" on the new album, as an example). So in items such as the infobox describing "current members," the Classic Petra lineup is named, while the photo is of the lineup that retired in 2005 (which one could argue was less "Petra" than the one reuniting now). That seems like a good compromise, but I'm open to other suggestions, including the possibility of a separate Wikipedia page, though I'm cautious about doing that, given the potential for confusion.
That's something everybody will have differing opinions about and could probably be debated until the Lord comes again. 
You're wise to want to try and avoid confusion though.