I was showing a friend at work the Wikipedia entry for my hometown when something caught her eye. As I started to look closer, I noticed more interesting facts I was previously unaware of …
Not only that, but …
Well, I’ll be damned.
I’m marrying a male.
What a radical make up.
This happens on my own town’s webpage here and there… not all that often, but here and there… Someone doesn’t like the mayor so they change his name to one of several that involve a mocking or vulgar word… Its a stretch almost every time.
Either a computer picks up on it and reverts it or someone checking recent edits almost always gets to it quick. I only check it once or twice a month to see if anyone does some edits that would concern any of the parts I’ve contributed majorly (what I thought was cool is that one or two sentences I wrote about something historic was researched heavily by other people and expanded on greatly into something far better written than I could’ve ever done… And with more information about it than I knew).
Another problem is that Sundance just loved a movie filmed in my town. Its a small town. Frozen River is the name of it. Mostly its filmed in a super super small town thats next to mine, really. Its about the mohawk reservation and cultural identity and all that stuff. Someone decided to put something like a 6 paragraph summary of the film under a “Film Shooting” section on the hometowns page.
Groan.
I cut it down to a couple sentences. Also, that whole native american culture thing that the movie is about? My small town has no interaction with it besides people going there to purchase cartons of cigarettes cheaper. That whole several paragraphs was worse than vandalism, IMHO, it was blatant advertising for the movie by someone who loved it and was from this town.
clayton_e, I share your pain. I am not sure what kind of cruft it falls under, not that devoted of a 'kipedian to know or care, but I really hate when something like <single random event> dominates an article.
I know you’re really excited and proud that something neat happened in your hometown, I would be, too, but that doesn’t mean you copy the 3 screen article of that something neat and paste it into your town’s article. A little blurb and a link to the main article will suffice.
Argh! The Portage one is so full of shit and grammatical errors i can’t stand to read the whole thing. It seems to have been written by a drunken employee of the Chamber of Commerce. This type of article is why I hate Wiki articles. Maybe the page was a product of the first grade class having a writing assignment, because it can’t be the product of an adult with a High School education. They praise the beautiful canal. It’s not an eyesore only during the winter when it’s frozen over and the garbage festering in it is covered by snow. The smell during most of the year is horrible from the stagnant green water with the floating trash.
Sweet mercy, Harmonious Discord, I’ve never seen so much glurge written about a town I’ve never heard of before! It reads like some kind of semi-apologetic sales pitch.
They went on to blame the businesses on the north side of town by the interstate for their lack of customers at the downtown retailers. The downtown has never taken responsibility for their practices first driving everybody to Madison and later to the newly developed north end. In what way does that glurg belong on the Wiki page? It really reads like our Chamber of Commerce edits that page.
If you think it stinks, change it! It’s Wikipedia! You’re totally allowed!
I like mine the way it is!
Actually I’m considering deleting the two sentences left… It really has nothing to do with the town whatsoever.
And someone put up a photo of the cemetery gate because its been around since 1910 or something like that and had “local cemetery” or somesuch written in French… Because we had more people that lived here back then that spoke French than now. Um. Ok. It just wasn’t notable.
Glurg as it is I don’t care what Wiki says as I consider it a unreliable source that changes with the sigh of a wind. Were it actually a permanent page I might bother to ask for a correction. Wiki isn’t worth the trouble. I just brought up what i saw on it as a good example of Wiki articles.
I had to look up a town near me once for some purpose and somebody had put that 40% of the residents were dwarves. I corrected it to 38%.
OK, no I didn’t. I just took it out.
That’s quite possible. At least the page for my city seems a bit more scholarly.
I also thought the pages for my hometown and especially that of the small city next door sounded very boosterish. It’s probably a common Chamber of Commerce practice.
I’ll no doubt get shat upon for this as I have in the past around these parts, but you do understand that “Wiki” is not Wikipedia, right? That’s like calling the SDMB “web.” There are thousands of other wikis out there with both greater and lesser levels of glurge, some of which work very well.
Just to nitpick, it’s more like calling the SDMB “the Dope,” which in fact a lot of people do. If someone says “I found it on Wiki,” I think it’s widely understood that they’re shortening “Wikipedia.” If they say, “I found it on a wiki,” then that refers to some generic other wiki.
Not that this is a particularly hot-button issue for me.
Actually, it’s more like calling the SDMB “the board”.
I do not trust anything on the intwarnet, not even what I post there.
Hm. Point taken.