Larry Beckett Case Study

The Client 

Larry Beckett is a well-respected poet, singer, and songwriter. However, the Wikipedia article about him was out of date, primarily only covering his music pursuits. To the Point Collaborative helped him update it to reflect his prolific poetry career.

The Challenge

Beckett’s article was primarily about his early songwriting career, and collaborations with other musicians. It didn’t include his decades-long literary career and newly released book.

Objective

Since the 1970s, Beckett has been best known for his songwriting relationship with high school friend and musician Tim Buckley. Prior to working with To the Point Collaborative, the article primarily highlighted this relationship with Buckley and Beckett’s music writing and collaborations with other musicians. The content about his 50-year poetry career was sparse. Beckett wanted a section on his poetry, and for the article to more broadly cover his full career.

The Solution

To the Point worked with Larry and his wife, Laura, to review media coverage of his literary career. Then we added content to reflect his robust poetry career. This included adding a dedicated poetry section to the article, listing that section towards the top of the page, and cleaning up and categorizing a very large catchall section titled “Later years.”

Together, we worked with volunteer Wikipedia editors, conforming to the platform’s guidelines to get our requested edits and additions made.

Strategy

When someone wants to edit their own Wikipedia article, they need to follow specific guidelines. Directly editing your own article, or one with which you have a connection is what Wikipedia calls a conflict of interest (COI).

Wikipedia prohibits direct article edits in a COI situation so that content can remain neutral and balanced. The guidelines specify that proposed edits need to be requested rather than made directly. Once requested, edits are reviewed by volunteer Wikipedia editors and either approved and made, or denied.

In order to successfully update Beckett’s page, To the Point:

• Reviewed media content to make sure the coverage was from reliable sources,
• Drafted the edits in a way that adhered to Wikipedia’s neutral tone requirement,
• Formatted the edits and sources with Wiki syntax coding, and
• Proposed the edits on the talk page of the article.

This process was conducted episodically over several months to ensure we didn’t overwhelm the volunteer community with a large amount of content all at once.

 

The Results

After working methodically with Wikipedia’s volunteer community, while adhering to the guidelines for COI editing, Beckett’s page now more accurately reflects his full career. His works as a poet and lyricist are reaching new audiences at a time in life when most artists’ careers have long since wound down.

Not long after the final updates were made to Beckett’s page, he received a call from a media producer who wanted to release his poetry digitally. As a result, Beckett’s life’s work is now streaming across multiple platforms.

Here’s what Larry had to say about this work with To the Point Collaborative:

“So, I was told I had a Wikipedia page. Wow. Of course, a lot was wrong, and it was way incomplete. That was before To the Point Collaborative worked on it. After that, this guy’s in his swimming pool, hears a song on the radio, googles it, finds out that he used to know me, one of the songwriters, checks out my Wikipedia page and, on the strength of that, contacts me and sets up a business arrangement where the poetry I’ve written and recorded over the last 50 years, in my book “American Cycle,” is on all streaming services.

“Thanks, To the Point Collaborative!”