The Mandolin, By and For Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCIII

Mandolin

It helps to know a little bit about everything when you're in the business of exposing freelancer writers who've faked it. Truth be told, if you know a little about something, you can recognize bullshit statements made by someone who knows even less – and among our nominees, that "even less" too often translates to "zero." We're lucky that our staffers combined have a wide range of knowledge about many subjects, including a few who have musical training and even play an instrument. None of them plays the mandolin, but that didn't stop them from recognizing the musical illiteracy of WiseGEEK.com contributor S. Mithra, on display for the world to see in "What is a Mandolin?"¹

Trombones for the Dummy Musician

Parts of a trombone

Around these parts we're pretty convinced that when someone asks you about the "parts of" something, you would be wise to concentrate your efforts on the most important parts. Say, if someone were to ask you about the parts of a computer, you should probably concentrate on the processor and the input/output system before moving on the power cord and the USB ports. Doing it otherwise suggests that you don't know what your talking about... sort of like Lee Johnson trying to tell WiseGEEK.com readers, "What Are the Different Parts of a Trombone?"

Beginner Guitars for Dummies

Acoustic guitar

When the topic of "wannabe" comes up, at least one of our staffers will always become wistful about the guitar. It seems he's tried, a couple of times (at least), to learn to play the guitar; but to no avail. He does, however, have a few guitars around the house, so when he ran across the Wizzley.com article, "Best Guitar for Beginners," he was curious. Curious, that is, until he recognized the name of Mary F., an inveterate content farmer on the website. He read it anyway, and shared his notes at the next staff meeting.

Guitar Strings for the Total Dummy

Lori used a picture of nylon strings...

For several years, our staffers had ignored the website WiseGeek.com as a repository for internet dumbassery. Why? perhaps because they, like many, were fooled by the name. It could also be that the level of semi-plagiarism – skillful rewording of authoritative text – at the site was much higher than in the DMS¹ family of websites. There also seem to be far fewer candidate freelancers at WG meaning, perhaps, a bit more rigorous screening of their "qualifications." Nonetheless, there are plenty of posts that meet all our criteria for DotD; we just have to look a little harder. Look, we did, and we caught not-so-wise geek Lori Kilchermann bullshitting us with "How Do I Choose the Best Acoustic Guitar Strings?" Oops...

Cassette Tapes for Millennial Dummies

Cassette tape

One hoary old adage says we should never send a boy to do a man's work. Yes, we know, sexist: the hoary old adage-makers were pretty bad that way. Whatever the case, we have a different adage here at the Antisocial Network: we say, "Never send someone who's never used a thing to explain how it works." Sadly, that still wouldn't have prevented the hoary old Ralph Heibutzki from making a complete mess out of "How Do Cassette Tapes Work?" for good old eHow.com, though it's recently been moved to niche site OurPastimes.com¹...

Musical Pitch, the Dummies Version

brass instrument relative sizes

From the annals of the Antisocial Network's music research section comes today's DotD story. Now we must admit that we don't delve into music very often, probably because the vast majority of musical freelancing is reviews, which are opinions instead of facts. But every once in a while we run across someone making a bogus claim about the science of music (frequencies, wavelengths, that sort of stuff), which is what we have today. Let's see what Aaron Charles (Lundstrom) told the readers of eHow.com when he attempted to answer that age-old question, "What Instruments Have the Highest Pitch?" (now moved to OurPastimes.com)

Transposition for the Dummy Composer

Cleveland playing a trumpet?

We'll be honest here: nobody on staff here at the Antisocial Network has had any music lessons in longer than we'd like to think about (and none have had any composing or theory classes). Oh, sure, several of us played in high-school bands and a couple have tried desperately to learn the guitar (several times), but the truth is most of our musical expertise plays out in the car or the shower these days. So it goes. But that doesn't mean that we're so completely out of it that the instructions by eHow.com's Cleveland van Cecil (yet another freelancer nom de plume intended, we suspect to protect the guilty) didn't strike a sour note. Get it? a music joke? Whatever. Anyway, Cleveland is definitely not the person we would ask to explain "How to Change Trumpet Notes to Match Guitar Chords" at OurPastimes.com, nosiree, Bob...

Though we can be reasonably sure Cleve took a music appreciation class to get that BA in Liberal Arts of his, apparently he didn't ever actually take a music class. That's why, when performing a copy-reword-paste job on his question, he got something wrong. 

Antique Guitar Identification for Dummies

Custom-made guitar

The hallmark of good old eHow.com has always been freelancers holding forth on topics about which they know nothing. Even a rudimentary knowledge of a topic is often sufficient to realize that the content isn't original, but simply parroted from another website. We don't have an expert on guitars at the Antisocial Network, but even our wannabe Eric Clapton knows hella more than eHow.com's Meredith Jameson, who tried to explain "How to Identify Antique Guitars" (moved by Leaf Group to their niche site Our Pastimes [and then deleted¹]). She failed miserably...

Meredith's "process," such as it is, breaks down into 5 steps.