I was a pretty serious contributer for a time, there, though on un-serious topics, mostly Futurama-related, with a bit of Simpsons stuff, comic-book stuff (my plot summary of Watchmen is still reasonably intact, a year later), video-game stuff (I’m reasonably proud of my extensive Lady Bug edits, also mostly untouched) and I’ve fixed a lot of things that needed fixing because, dammit, there isn’t any such thing as a Vulcan Death Grip. It was a hoax! Anybody who saw that episode knows it’s a hoax! Only morons think it’s real!
But now television episode summaries are being (seemingly randomly) slapped with “This is being considered for deletion as Wikipedia is now way too important for this trivial crap - didja see us get mentioned on Dateline? Huh? Huh? We’re in the big leagues!” Also, Jack McCoy’s real name is “John J. McCoy”. It’s on the nameplate on his desk. It’s canon! Stop reverting it, you fucking idiots!
And what’s the deal with Wiki not liking trivia sections? It’s all trivia! Sure, some chuckleheads have abused the idea (“The escape pod in Air Force One resembles the one used by the droids in Star Wars”), but there are a great many verifiable, interesting factoids about pop-culture icons that make for good reading.
They’ve gone all Britannica on us, when I just wanted them to be, well, Cecil-like.
To play devil’s advocate here: I guess Wikipedia knows it has to aim for a higher trajectory than it will actually achieve. Try to be like Britannica and you’ll get Cecil. Try to be like Cecil and you’ll get usenet.
For all its faults, Wikipedia never ceases to amaze me in that there isn’t more crap on there that there is. They’re doing something right, even if the downside is that they come off as overinflated fuckwickets on occasion.
The point of those notices, as far as I can tell, is that anything you can put into a trivia section can also be put into the main body of an article.
I’m not sure if that’s true, but that’s what they believe. At the least, it’s probably intended to keep the trivia section from being three times bigger than the main body.
I’ve also contributed on some varied issues, usually about word/item origins.
To use an example about “cheeseburger”–who the fuck cares which tv shows a cheeseburger shows up in? Get over it! The only thing important is where the cheeseburger originated, and what it is. I can live with a few examples over the years about the development and expansion of what constitutes a cheeseburger. But, I don’t care to know about what restaurant in your town serves it, I don’t care that an episode of M.A.S.H. included it, I don’t care that a cheeseburger in Gondowandoland is made up of tofu and goat entrails.
Heh. I contribute quite a bit to Wikipedia as well, but strictly as a grammar gnome: I surf Wiki for hours, correcting spelling, punctuation and syntax as I go. Needless to say, I never run out of things to keep me busy. It’s like trying to bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon.
The trivia notices aren’t there to say there can’t be trivia, only that there can’t be a trivia section. They’re just trying to reduce the granularity of the glorious, disjointed mess that is Wikipedia.
It’s still fun. When you notice that the first sentence in John Goodman’s entry has been changed from “Emmy-nominated” to “Emmy-winning”, you can thank me.
Maybe the founders of Wikipedia never really meant for it to be yet one more place on the web for geeky fans of television shows to argue about their minutia. Just a thought.
They’re not deleting things because they’re trivia. That’s just happens to be one of the currently popular reasons used as an excuse for deletion in general. If “trivial” isn’t usable, they’ll call it “not important” or “unencyclopediac” or “NPOV” or “fancruft” or “non-Consensus” or “Western-centric” instead.
I call them termites. Individually, they’re insignificant but collectively, they’re destroying Wikipedia one bite at a time.
Creating is difficult but un-creating is easy. It can take a team of men a year to put up a building but it only takes a second for one idiot with a match to burn it down. Some people see how much bigger the world is than they are and are inspired to grow. Other people try to shrink the world down until it’s smaller than them.
I quit contributing to Wikipedia after seeing, time after time, hours of work being made by myself or someone else dismissed out of hand by people who couldn’t even be bothered to take the time to read it because they apparently had a quota of deletions to make. (True story - there was a guy on the vote for deletion page who would go through every day and post “Agree. Delete.” next to every single item. He was voting to delete over a hundred items each day. How many do you think he bothered to read?)
“Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
I agree that ideally the Jackson article should have a bigger word count than Batman’s. But the problem is the means of achieving this goal. The difficult way would be to expand Jackson’s article to 12,000 words. The easy shortcut would be to cut the Batman article down to 6,000 words. Of course then somebody might argue that Lincoln was a more important president than Jackson so Jackson’s article should be cut down until it’s smaller than Lincoln’s. And somebody else will say that Lincoln was just one figure in the American Civil War so his article should be smaller than the Civil War’s. And then somebody will say that we shouldn’t focus so much on wars and the Civil War was just a small part of American history so we should cut the Civil War article down until it’s smaller than the History of the United States article. And somebody else will accuse everyone of being US-centric and insist on cutting down the United States article until it’s no bigger than the History of Paraguay article.
By this point, the Batman article’s been cut down to about twenty words. Which is when somebody will start complaining about how long the Spiderman article is in comparison when everyone knows Batman is more important.
Lest you think I’m joking, there was an article on durum wheat. Somebody had gone to the trouble of writing a few paragraphs outlining the production of durum wheat on a state-by-state basis and contrasting it with other grain products. Then somebody else came along and said we shouldn’t talk about just American wheat production and their solution was to delete all the references to American wheat production and turn a multi-paragraph article into a single sentence. Which somebody else suggested should be deleted because it was a stub article that contained very little information.
Plus, one could argue that there are ten thousand, and better, resources for Andrew Jackson out there. How many are there for someone who actually wants to know more about Batman?
So what you are saying is that, if some people believe Wikipedia is concentrating on shit, they should shut up and provide some more REAL content?
I never could get what arguments against net stupidity were really about if the people complaining about it were too busy complaining to contribute, especially since adding to the info on Wikipedia is a cut and paste away. If you have a paper from college about Andrew Jackson laying around EDIT the damned entry!
samclem, I realize that, in your case, you’d have to retype it. Or scan and OCR it, if the paper isn’t too fragile by now.
