Fastfission wrote:
If [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] were wonderful,
featured articles
then he could have picked any of the dozens upon dozens of other
biographies of major figures who haven't had a full editing treatment
from many knowledgeable editors. The "find crappy articles on
Wikipedia" game is not one we can ever win -- the person looking for
crap will find it.
Yes, but these are not exactly obscure people. If he went and found an
article on an obscure 13th century poet which was crap, I would be not
quite as bothered. But Jane Fonda? Bill Gates?
These entries could be contentious, heavily edited, prone to vandalism,
occassionally biased, etc., and I would be happier than I am right now.
What I'm unhappy about is *bad writing*.
When people do that -- okay, there might be a real
cause for concern.
But if they're looking at articles which just haven't had the benefit
of a swirl of interested and informed attention -- well, that's always
going to be the majority of the encyclopedia in the way things are
done here. There's no point in which the numbers on that will ever
really change. Wikipedia is not going to ever be valued for its
"completeness" or its "coherency" -- it will be valued for its
intellectual property model, its breadth, its concept, its speed, and,
in the end, some aspect of its "usefulness", which is a moving target.
Well, I don't agree. It is my intention that we be valued for
completeness and coherency and "brilliant prose" *as well as* for being
freely licensed, with magnificent breadth and speed and usefulness, etc.
--Jimbo