The number of undergraduates who think that a Wikipedia article is an acceptable reference for a research paper is absolutely mindblowing.
Jumping the gun on deletions and slapping stupid maintenance tags are my current Wikipeeves. I started an article the other night. It was admittedly very brief and non-detailed and I planned to expand it within 24 hours. Within two minutes it was speedy deleted. I recreated it and even noted in the log that I was going to expand it. It got speedy deleted again almost instantly. I ended up creating it a third time and deliberately put information in it that was false solely for the purpose of making the article longer and therefore less likely to be speedy deleted in 28 seconds. They left that one alone and I expanded it the next day. I wrote another article and within three minutes it was tagged both with a “nothing links here” tag and a “an editor questions the notability of this article” tag.
First off, how do these people even find these articles within three minutes of their creation? Secondly, have none of them heard of the concept of patience? It hurts nothing to have a factually correct but very short article up for a day. If you’re really that concerned about having a small article up, then watch it for a day and if it isn’t elaborated upon, then speedy delete it.
But sometimes judgement is necessary to convey information. If we stuck strictly to the facts we would have to say “F. Scott Fitzgerald is a 20th century American author” and “Harold Robbins is a 20th century American author” without ever mentioning that one has a much better reputation than the other because that would be an opinion even if it’s shared by 99% of informed readers.
So what happens when I write an article about an obscure subject? Suppose I say that Sven Olafson and Olaf Svenson were two 10th century Swedish poets. Which one was a hack and which one was a genius?
So what? If I want to write an article about every member of my favorite hockey team, why not? You may not care about hockey but some people do. And some of them are going to want to look up the players to find out what town they were born in and where they went to school.
Why is it that if you can name every top-40 single from 1996 you’re a hard-core fan who’s obsessed with trivia but if you can name every Nobel laureate from 1996 you’re a well-informed person with deep knowledge?
There’s a feature that lets you see the fifty most recent edits and which highlights newly created articles. Some people use this feature to pounce on new articles like yours.
You mean Wikipedia actually facilitates people being dickholes? That makes me sad.
Well, it is. Depending on the fact & circumstances of course. I agree that often it’s not a good reference, but it certainly can link to an acceptable one.
After hearing Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy” I immediately set off to cross one more nerdism off my list: my first Wiki edit. I found an article about an American, and I edited “judgement” (British Spelling) to “judgment” (American Spelling).
It was gone in less than 30 seconds.
Sigh. I’m going to spend tonight with a roll of bubble wrap instead.
If one has a My Yahoo! home page, it can be set up to alert you to recently added Wikipedia articles.
I’ll admit I’ve sometimes jumped on new articles. But I’ve never deleted one. If it looks bad, I try to bring it up to Wikipedia standards.
For example if I found a new article Little Nemo that said:
I’d change it to:
You see? I try to address a problem by adding not subtracting.
See, now I wonder why Tolkien didn’t include any chicken recipes. He included everything else, including the creation of the world and all the races. So why is there not a good chicken recipe in one of the appendices or something? Imagine all the money Christopher Tolkien could make with a Middle Earth cookbook.
Quite frankly, I’m not sure I want to see LotR porn.
Nice try, but we all know you were talking about Fabulous Creature.
I guess I’m a little annoyed when I come across a page wherein someone has identified a sentence that is incorrect, but instead of fixing the error, merely adds a sentence right afterward mentioning why it is an error. Since you’re bothering to do anything at all, just go all the way and make the fix!
If it links to an acceptable reference, then the reference source isn’t Wikipedia…it’s whatever source it links to. A Wikipedia article itself is pretty much never an acceptable reference for an academic paper.
What annoys me about Wikipedia’s apologists is that they reply to all complaints about accuracy with the mantra “Well if it’s wrong, why don’t you correct it?” I go to a reference source to *find out *information, not to *give *it. If I can’t trust the information I find there, it’s useless, even if it’s actually correct.
I was going to link to some LotR wingfic, just to prove that there’s stuff much, much worse than LotR porn. But, I thought some might not know what wingfic is, so I thought to check Wikipedia.
Which redirects from wingfic to slashfic, which article is a hoot and a half. Good Lord.
I especially like the touch of adding the giant-sized “/” graphic, to show what a “slash” is. Really helps explain the concept, doesn’t it?
Anyway, now I’m at work, and no way I’m googling LotR wingfic here, so I’m afraid y’all’ll have to find it on your own.
Why not? It can have cites, references, and footnotes. True, the facts may be incorrect, but the facts can be incorrect in a book too. Wiki can be baised- but so can a book.
My biggest gripe is when I’ve edited Wikipedia articles for grammar, spelling, etc… because they look like they were written by semi-literate cretins, and then, those semi-literate cretins RE-EDIT the article to re-fuck-it-up.
It just kills me that these people have the temerity to go re-edit articles with the intention of making the subject and verb no longer agree, or to make the sentence structure extremely tortured and hard to understand, when the article said the same damn thing, but made good sense to anyone who actually understands English.
On a related note, it also bugs me when people routinely present opinion-based comments as factual information in articles, but I usually edit the sentence to reflect that, and it usually sticks.
Wouldn’t matter, I’m not going to choose cooking from a recipe written in late modern high elven over downloading cave troll porn. No way.
The lack of traceability. One of the main purposes of academic references is for the reader to be able to go back to your sources and follow the routes through which specific pieces of information have travelled. With a source which can be changed in real time by anybody, this cannot be done with any reliability. (FWIW, it’s the same reasoning which prevents us editing our own posts on this board.)
Yes, before anyone says so, this means that there’s a difficulty with using any online source as a reference. But these are not nearly as great as with Wikipedia.
Then let me ask you, do you think 51 is a remarkable age to give birth?