Is there a blog that highlights the stupidest Wikipedia events? I subscribe to the RSS feed of the Lamest edit wars article, but I find that insufficient.
Repository of All Human Knowledge - In Anime.
Our work here will not be complete until every Wikipedia page contains an "In Anime" sub-section.
Tags: doomed, firstperson, furries, wiki, www
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16 Responses:
I submit this (Something Positive nominated for deletion)
Well, the "In Amine" thing is just one aspect of Wikipedia's often-bloated "In Popular Culture" sections.
Not that documenting popular culture is a bad thing for an encyclopedia, but often what should be a few of the most prominent examples turns instead into an indiscriminate mess.
How could you not enjoy reading about how a thousand obscure webcomics used something as a pop culture reference?
Looking back at the Previouslies, a number of the wikigroans seem to have been fixed, either by the real-world article being improved, or the fandom article collapsing under its own weight into an illegible list of issues/episodes/quotes/etc. I wonder if this was a conscious response to this perception of Wikipedia on the part of committed editors fixing the arguably worthwhile pages, or just a natural result of fan infighting destroying the fictional reference pages.
I'd generally hope that they'd be improved by people improving the real-world article. It's not like Wikipedia is running out of space and so needs to not carry articles about fannish things.
They clutter up articles, categories, and search results, though. This is all the worse when the only reason Wikipedia has some semblance of organisation is because of significant elbow grease.
Besides, if the wannabe-Japanese want to obsess over bad animation, that's what wikia are for. The trekkies, Star Wars fans, and---hell---even furries seem to manage it.
Clearing out inane cross-references is good editing. It pollutes the more serious topics and the factoids shouldn't even survive on the subjects they reference (as illustrated by the "in popular culture" xkcd).
But a lot of wikigroans still exhibit a conflict of interest: editors must delete / merge / trim down minutiae in order to bee good editors... b-b-b-b-but Optimus Prime is so awesome, he deserves 3 separate pages!
The hard problem is getting the volume of contributions on material subjects eclipse the huge catalogs of pure entertainment subjects. I think that attacking the later by beefing up notability requirements lead to huge nerdrage and also some of my favorite wikigroans where editors show even more astonishing bias and capricious reasoning.
I think there's a good lesson as to what practices give legitimacy to the site as well as keep the community from fragmenting. Everything2 vs Urbandictionary - you can find horrendous loads of absolute shit on UD, but it is younger and more widely referenced than E2. Allow more subjects, but contain and consolidate them. Even to the point of segregating articles based on category and importance.
If neither E2 nor UD existed, the world would not be less for it.
Whereas for all its flaws, Wikipedia is clearly something the world would be less without. Of course that's part of what makes its flaws so interesting...
I've never not found what I wanted at the top of my search because of an anime entry or some other "frivolous" thing. YMMV, of course.
Just like how all the irrelevant garbage on the internet as a whole clutter up search results there! Oh, wait, we solved that problem.
>For the practical concerns of today, Mediawiki's search is no PageRank.
First of all, this is more of an argument to vastly improve the search engine, not to constrain the type of content an article can hold.
Secondly, your example has nothing to do with fancruft! Even if all the in popular culture sections were removed, search results still wouldn't be relevant.
>Better search algorithms do nothing to keep categories useful.
Categories were never useful. Yahoo proved this a decade ago.
>Better searching does nothing to keep articles uncluttered from extraneous sections, either. If nothing else, think of the page load times.
Oh please. Static HTML renders at light speed, compared to javascript-riddled new media crap that everyone's so fond of today.
>Mediawiki performs operations involving the entire document space (obvious example: backlinks, given that all links are embedded)
What are backlinks? In event, this is just bad design. If your design doesn't scale, this does not mean "give up", it means "fix your broken shit".
Look, I've done studies on this (there's a book chapter yet to show up there because this just reminded me to add it, which is my one positive takeaway for getting dragged into another idiotic online argument). Editors expend considerable effort on maintaining categories. They get used. (Hell, science aside, I use them.)
I'm not getting into the rest, because I'm pretty sure this is not the place. If you have an insatiable desire to flame me, my own journal is over there.→
If nothing else, think of the page load times.
Paleoconservatism, at one point one of the longest articles on wikipedia, loads for me in about two seconds.
Pokèmon, miniscule by comparison, loads for me in about two seconds.
I'd say the biggest problems the entries cause are namespace collision, and the potential for confusion between the real-world events and cultural impact of fictional work and in-universe events/characters/places/etc.
I think Wikia is actually really good for solving this problem... Wikipedia can maybe do a quick mention of a fictional character or episode with the link out to the more detailed and universe-specific entry on the relevant fiction-targeted wiki. And putting it under another domain name "demotes" the content a bit relative to Wikipedia's role as encyclopedia, as far as people looking things up is concerned.