[WikiEN-l] Re: Can you trust Wikipedia?

Sun Oct 30 03:06:41 UTC 2005

> From: Michael Turley <michael.turley at gmail.com>
>
> I'm not a fan of random degeneration, but I also don't subscribe to
> the view that this is what is occuring.  I think that just as people
> know good writing when they see it, you and I will know a good edit on
> articles on our watchlist.

I am troubled by what I'll call "persistent cruft injection" and I  
think it is a real problem. Two that have impinged on me:

One is the use of names for large numbers--names that don't appear in  
dictionaries, aren't in real use, and are neologisms or hypothetical  
curiosities or useless extensions of systematic naming patterns. Back  
in second grade all us nerdy types enjoyed knowing the names of  
bigger numbers than our peers knew, but we ought to have outgrown  
that. Nevertheless there is a persistent tendency to add  
"googolquadruplex" and "brontobyte" and "zebibyte" and so forth. They  
are added typically by anons, and, I think, different anons. They  
don't care to read through previous discussions or reasons why  
certain words should or should not be added or how they should be  
described. They know (or think they know) the name of a bigger number  
than any other contributor has yet added to the article, so in it goes.

Another is academic boosterism. Virtually every article about any  
major university seems to have a continuing tendency to accumulate  
more and more braggadocio. I see that Harvard, for example, now  
contains as its second sentence "It is widely considered one of the  
finest academic institutions in the world." U. S. News and World  
Report rankings keep filtering in to university articles, and if an  
institution does not rank high in that listing, then other listings  
in which it does rank highly ("Washington Monthly," anyone?) will be  
used instead. Conversely, any information that is perceived as being  
negative gets removed. Sometimes you can get temporary agreement that  
a particular paragraph has gotten a little over-the-top, but it  
doesn't do much good because a few months later someone else decides  
that if Yale is going to mention how many Nobel laureates it has  
graduated, then they had better, too.

The contrast between university articles in Wikipedia and their  
counterparts in traditional encyclopedias is dramatic. Ours read like  
admissions-office brochures.

Jason Scott's comments were very unpleasant, but his reference to how  
one moves from creating content to _defending_ content has a ring of  
truth to it.

It is difficult to form a stable consensus when there isn't a stable  
community within which to form one.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/