[WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

Fri Oct 7 04:30:56 UTC 2005

On 10/6/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php
>
> But the two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific
> embarassment. [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable
> crap.
>

Uh oh. Moral panic time. Again.

Go and read Eventualism. Relax.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Eventualism

I think you're likely to get this style of waffle when most people who edit
an article think they know about the subject, but have no real knowledge.
Subjects from popular culture, such as Fonda and Gates, haven't had a chance
yet. Wait until they've been dead for a decade or so, and the wave of
amateurism will give way to more professional writing.

There are good Wikipedia articles. I like this one because it's shaped like
an onion. You can go for the outside ring of the onion, or you can peel it
right down to the core.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus

It isn't perfect, but it's okay.

Articles like Bill Gates and Jane Fonda are the hopeless cases. You might as
well run a featured article drive on both of them, it couldn't do any harm.

By the way, I found Nicholas Garr's writing almost impenetrable. As far as I
can tell, peeking through the thickets of his prose, he seems to be using a
worldwide communication network to write an article intended to deny that
anything at all extraordinary has happened to the world in the past two
decades. "The Internet had transformed many things, but it had not
transformed us. We were the same as ever." Well, only if you posit some "us"
that is in some way different from everything that has changed about us in
the past twenty years. Does he mean that we still need to eat and drink?
Well thank you, Captain Obvious!