Meantone temperament

I spent most of yesterday editing Wikipedia's article on the meantone temperament.

By mid-2006, it had become clear to Bill Sethares, Andy Milne and I that our music theoretical work was focused on what have historically been called "extended meantone temperaments." We considered using that name in our own work, but we rapidly learned that the tuning community would have none of it. The term "meantone" was loaded down with an oppressive weight of historical baggage. For us to redefine the term, even slightly, or to broaden the scope of its usage, was anathema. Hence, we called our thingy the "syntonic temperament," and its valid tuning range the "syntonic tuning continuum," and so on, to avoid violating sacred historical precedent.

But it's really just a continuum of extended meantone tuning, in which we're tempering timbres in addition to notes, and thereby retaining the option of consonance across the entire tuning continuum.

The jargon of traditional tuning theory seems to me to be quite seriously muddled, especially in its failure to distinguish cleanly between a "temperament" (a set of rules, defined by a comma sequence, for mapping partials to notes) and a "tuning" (a combination of generator widths). This lack of distinction probably arises from tuning theory's obsession with the Harmonic Series (which is perfectly understandable, given the dominance of harmonic timbres in the history of Western music). If one assumes that the only timbres that matter to music are harmonic timbres, then the "mapping of partials to notes" is an irrelevant step, so tunings and temperaments become essentially the same thing...as the historical jargon-muddle reflects.

All of which made re-writing Wikipedia's Meantone temperament article harder.

NOw, the fun part will be seeing how long my edits last. Will the tuning community's Old Guard simply revert them away, hence defending tuning theory's status quo? Our will the edits be accepted, albeit perhaps with slight revisions?

Now that our theory is backed up by a slew of peer-reviewed scientific papers, it would be rather difficult to justify simply reverting the edits out of existence. Passions can run quite high in such tiny communities, however, so I am loathe to predict the outcome.