The UBC Graduate School of Journalism won a $15,000 grant in August 2009 to work with CBC Radio 3 on researching and building a Canadian music wiki: an attempt at a Wikipedia of Canadian music, where listeners would collaborate on a single online resource rather than each keeping their own notes.
The money came through the MITACS ACCELERATE internship programme, which pairs graduate researchers with British Columbia companies on short applied projects and put up half the funding, with CBC Radio 3 as industry partner covering the rest. The intern was Amanda Ash, a UBC journalism student then interning at the Victoria Times-Colonist, who had freelanced for the Vancouver Sun, CBC Radio 3, the Edmonton Journal and Exclaim! Magazine, and whose specialism was arts and culture reporting with music journalism as the strongest part of it.
The research question was narrower than the product. Building the site was a way to test what user-generated content is actually worth inside a public broadcaster, and what wiki software in particular contributes, rather than to assert that it works. CBC Radio 3 was a reasonable place to run that test: it had the most consistent record of new media projects at the Canadian public broadcaster, most of them aimed at helping people find Canadian music.