I’m ambivalent about Wikipedia. On the one hand, it’s a good resource for pop culture trivia; on the other, the fact that anyone can edit can article makes it, to me, fundamentally untrustworthy on matters of genuine import. So, while I use it it as a starting point for research, I won’t use it as a sole source on any question more important than “what are seven kinds of equipment commonly found on playgrounds?”
One thing that vexes me about Wikipedia, and Wikis in general, is the inclusion of utterly irrevelant information in articles. For instance, I just came across this little bit in the article on the Buffy character Drusilla:
(bolding mine)
I removed the bolded section as pointless; it adds nothing to the reader’s understanding of Drusilla. But after doing so, I wonder if that was the right thing to do. After all, Wikis are are unlimited length, so the extra sentence doesn’t actually waste resources the way it would in a print medium. On the other hand, I’m of the school that every sentence in an written work should bear its own weight, and that one, to my mind, does not; I think the article reads better without it.
So thus my question is two-fold:
Do you agree with making edits like that in Wikipedia articles?
I love the contentless ‘grouping’ articles-- “List of Articles about Christian Symbology” or something like that, but hate the fact that they’re rarely comprehensive or consistent.
I’ve always said that Wikipedia’s greatest flaw was not accuracy but style. Some people unfortunately do not know the difference between writing well and writing good.
Absolutely. One of Wikipedia’s biggest problems is “article creep”, which is when articles slowly accumulate random facts without organization and the explication suffers as a result. There are some really bad examples of this.
A clear and straightforward explication of the facts in a logical organization that makes sense when read.
I like the speed with which Wikipedia is updated. Often articles are updated with relevant information that is only hours or days old. Other information on the web is often years out of date.
• Worst problem: Not knowing the difference between substance and trivia.
• Not following the inverted pyramid style of writing: summary at top, supporting items at bottom. Most often I see this violated in overstuffed opening paragraphs.
• Dumb links (e.g., in a bio of Ray Bradbury, links for the common words “newspaper” and “library”, for those unaware of what those words mean).
• Vandalism.
• The often pointless category labels invented for articles.
• Anyone who disagrees with my writing or editing.
The only things that have ever really bugged me about it are the vandalism (which admittedly gets fixed really quickly) and the occasional occurrence of writing in the first person.
I’m not a bit enough of a Wiki user to be especially opinionated on the topic, but I have a certain inclination to feel that with unlimited space extra information, so long as it’s accurate, factual, and on-topic, should always be included and/or left be. However, that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t benefit from better organization.
In this case, assuming that bolded factoid is true, I think it’d have been wiser for you to remove the comment from that location and added a “Trivia” subsection which included it. So long as trivia and similarly frivilous data do not impede the usefulness of the article from a reference standpoint I see no reason to lose it.
Wiki is not intended to be the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
I get annoyed by excessive “red linking” - where people add a whole pile of brackets to an article, creating dozens of links to articles that don’t exist and nobody is ever going to write.
And while I am generally well into the inclusionist camp, I do find the fancruft can get overwhelming. No, we don’t need a seperate article on every character who ever spoke a single line on your favorite TV show.
One of Wikipedia’s guideline thingies is “Be Bold.” Basically, if you think you can fix it, fix it. They keep a database of all the previous versions of each page (I wonder where they find the space for all this?) so if an article is damaged by it’s fix, it can be unfixed back to it’s previous state.
Just leave a note in the Discussion area for the article explaining why you did that (also describe the change in the summary field when you submit your changes), so people know why you changed it.
Oh, one of the more annoying things for me is any article where basic grammar and spelling wasn’t taken into account. Especially where areas of my fandom are concerned. I had to clean up a bunch of Honor Harrington related articles that read like bad fanfiction. They had lots of good stuff, that seemed to be organized well enough, but with the sentence and word structure of a 11 year old girl writing Harry/Draco fanfic.
Another thing that bothers me is when an article gets factual information wrong. An article about Benedict Arnold mentioned his victory at the Battle of Valcour Island. Which was interesting, because he lost that battle (every gunboat under his command was either sunk or run aground by a larger British force, in one of the very peculiar lake battles that we fought against the British.
What I love is how quickly some articles get expanded and refined. I once posted a very brief article about the Grayson Space Navy (from the Honor Harrington stories) with one or two paragraphs. I came back a couple days later and found an expansive article with a history of their major battles, unit compositions, types of ships used, lots of stuff. I think one of my original sentences might have still been in there.
But how do you tactfully explain to somebody that they’re a horrible writer? Or, leaving aside tact, how do you convince them? Most of them don’t see it - they can’t perceive how their writing is any different from anyone else’s.
Here’s an article I wrote:
Without false modesty, I feel this is a well written stub on the subject. It explains what the subject is and gives some of the most important facts. And it’s coherent.
A fan came along and added to the article. Here’s what it looked like with his contributions:
Now, I’ve read the story and I realize what he’s attempting is a description of what happened in the first issue. But anyone who doesn’t already know what he’s talking about is not going to get much useful information out of what he wrote.
For that matter, I don’t think the writer understood a lot of what he was reading - the actual book was more subtle with the surface story often having events which were paralleled by references to the characters’ backgrounds and inner lives. But the guy who wrote this seemed only to have picked up on the surface and missed the subtext, which is where the real story was. It’s like a parody description I once read of Crime and Punishment: “A guy kills a woman. Then he turns himself in.”
Usually whenever I comment on spelling and grammar, I go out of my way to make sure I spelled “spelling and grammar” and sometimes miss other stuff. :rolleyes:
Well, I describe it as “cleaning up” or “fleshing out” an article. I never say “threw out all that useless unintelligible tripe” or “pretty much had to rewrite the whole damn thing”.
Most annoying: People linking generic stuff just because they can. Just because someone wrote “1998” or “United States” in an article doesn’t mean we need a link to those pages. They just clutter things up and make it harder to read.
Mildly annoying: Wiki writing style. This is where someone writes a sentence. Then someone else wants to clarify, so they throw a modifying clause on the end. This is really obvious once you start looking for it. Then repeat a couple of times, including breaking the sentences apart when they get too long, and you end up with a completely unstructured paragraph. Very few people are willing to rewrite the whole thing.
What annoys me is all the trivia from fictional works. In many cases (such as with Tolkien stuff), much of the detail supplied isn’t even important to the actual novels or maybe is only mentioned in an appendix. I don’t think “all the details we can glean about a fictional universe” is a proper focus for an encyclopedia. Information about finctional works should be limited to broad themes, not detailed trivia.
