wikipedia follies

[rone]

<palecur> I am embarrassed that the article on the Khitomer Accords is longer, better organized, and more thorough than the article on the Crimean War.
<palecur> it speaks poorly of us as a species.

Comments

[marknau.livejournal.com]

But. Um. It's not.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

I want very much to agree with this point, except that for the specific example at hand it appears to be wrong on all counts. :-)

[ptomblin-lj.livejournal.com]

And yet the article on Khemal Attaturk doesn't mention his menagerie named Abdul.

[palecur.livejournal.com]

It was two years ago, when I checked. Stupid self-editing web site making me look bad again.

Finding the inner-Buddha while others see the inner-Erkel

[therobbergirl.livejournal.com]

No, it means the species is improving, hooray!

[crisper.livejournal.com]

And the biography of Gandalf is more thorough than that of Arafat, yeah. (Even worse, the first time I looked up Gandalf, there had not yet been an edit to indicate, anywhere in the page, that he is a fictional character. Everything about him was stated in a narrative voice suggesting absolute factuality.)

[crisper.livejournal.com]

You know, YOU have the power to change that BACK.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Well, inasmuch as there are facts about fictional Gandalf, the facts printed in the same language as the article in a series of sources that're considered canon.

Whereas Arafat, in addition to his proponents and detractors (to identify them in the mildest possible terms), would revise his own history to improve his image. Hell, he'd revise his present.

Only in death is his identity static, and that's temporary condition that'll be the case only when the historians take over the revision of his life and the slant of his image.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

This was something like the third thread started on the Citizendium forums: do we talk about fictional characters and settings in or out of voice?

The whole thing is good for hours of amusement - if you love to hate humanity.

[crisper.livejournal.com]

Ug. There is a place for people who want to write about fictional characters in-voice and that is fan-fic. That it even needs to be discussed as part of the development of a tool purporting to be a superior source of reference suggests there is already a dark seed of failure planted in its heart, I fear.

[crisper.livejournal.com]

I only mention Gandalf vs. Arafat because those happened to be two "people" I looked up in W around the same time. But really, it's to be expected: 90% of all construction of anything on the internet is done by dorks, and anything built by dorks is mostly going to look and smell like dorks. Believe me, being a dork, I know the smell of dork.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia article-discussion pages and revision histories are one of the best bang for the buck sources of Random Internet Damage entertainment you can find, especially if it's a current hot-button topic (which is when I went looking at the Arafat page, during his deathwatch). The last time I looked at the Scientology backstage, I couldn't even tell which side of the flamewar(s) was the Dianeticians and which were the Slaves of Xenu, they ALL sounded equally barking mad. And last week, it was the argument about whether Ayn Rand was a philosopher or not. I swear, the shit some people will spend their lives defending...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that the Khitomer vs. Crimea disparity eventually resolved itself. Part of this may be a question of relative rates: the things that dorks could write about off the tops of their heads, such as anime character bios and video game plots, filled up Wikipedia rapidly in the early years, whereas notable subjects take actual research.

The reason I feel kind of good about Wikipedia despite everything is, I think, the reason I mentioned a while ago: unlike the discussion pages and revision histories, which are dominated by Wikipedia regulars fond of pissing contests, the actual content (particularly on subjects that are actually worthy of note) mostly comes from occasional posters who are not interested in that crap. Citizendium is probably doomed because it's constructed to appeal to the hardest of the hardcore of Wikipedia policy infighters.