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This page in a nutshell: Don't use Wikipedia articles about music as a source for concert programme notes.

It has happened thrice in the past year: I've gone to a classical music concert, and the programme notes are copied straight out of Wikipedia. Only for one of the concerts was Wikipedia acknowledged.

This is a warning to concert organizers: Don't use Wikipedia as a source for concert programme notes. Whether or not you give Wikipedia credit (see Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia for information on how to do that), there are many problems with using Wikipedia for this purpose. The most obvious is that Wikipedia just wasn't meant as a source for ready-made programme notes: Instead of clever lead and conversational language, the Wikipedia article should just have the facts stated plainly; and you can be certain Wikipedia won't have information about your choir's or orchestra's history with the particular piece of music in question. But more importantly, Wikipedia is likely to be missing the very facts you would want in your programme notes if you knew those facts existed, even if those facts would be appropriate in a general encyclopedia (i.e., not one meant only for musicians) that wasn't subject to page limits.

This is because of the evolutionary path most articles about classical compositions take. The ideal evolutionary path (for any Wikipedia article) is gradual improvement though edits by many different people, with the information value in all edits (including vandalism) recognized and integrated into a version that comes closer and closer to perfection. But classical music articles generally take one of two paths after they're created:

1. The article stagnates. Useful metadata is added, maybe a spelling fix here and there, but the body of the article remains the same. The article only contains the information the original author considered relevant. Worse, the author could have left out a fact he considered relevant but thought someone else would add. The problem is that no one comes along to add it.

This generally happens to articles about music that is not as popular in the English-speaking world as it is elsewhere. While I try to get right the facts I do put in articles I start, there is no guarantee I won't make a mistake. Nor can I guarantee that others won't put deliberately false information in new articles. But even if false information is corrected, the person correcting it might not think to add other facts that might be relevant.

2. The article becomes the subject of an edit war. Despite many protestations that Wikipedia is not a battleground, articles on popular classical compositions are greatly fought over, and whether or not the issue of contention is just formatting, the content usually suffers. Indeed edit warring is a problem throughout Wikipedia. The winners of a fight gets to determine what is trivia (any information added by the losing side) and what sources are considered unreliable (any sources used by the losers). Unlike math, physics and computer science, for music Wikipedia has been unable to attract attract and keep experts in the field. So, when there is a fight over a music article, the winner is likely to be someone who knows next to nothing about music, but is extremely knowledgeable of Wikipedia's policies. The loser could very well be a musicologist who decides she just can't afford to be logged on to Wikipedia 24/7.

The facts you would like for your programme notes might be buried in the edit history. But with a concert to organize, you don't have time to wade through it. The edit summaries don't help, because both sides probably used misleading edit summaries to throw off the other side.

With either of these two evolutionary paths, the result is the same: the article lacks the very facts you would want in your programme notes.

My advice to you is: either invest the time to do your own research, starting with the foreword on the score, or invest the money to hire a musicologist to write your programme notes.

[edit] What concert organizers should use Wikipedia for

Regardless of any criticism of Wikipedia, many people still turn to it first. The fact is that many Google searches have a Wikipedia article as their top result. So if you announce what pieces are going to be on your concert, chances are some members of your audience will look up the music in Wikipedia prior to attending the concert.

When you get the next-to-final draft of the programme notes, look up the pieces in Wikipedia. With the assumption that your audience will read that version of the article, tailor the final draft to address questions an audience who has read the Wikipedia article might have.