The problem with the Internet is that any whacko with a connection gets to throw out his/her opinion, however wrong it may be. The Internet’s saving grace is that other whackoes can point out just how wrong the first whacko is.
Charlie Barratt wrote an article over at GamesRadar in which he points out that Wikipedia is nothing more than a haven for nerds. Sure, there may be millions of articles, but they are all about nerdy things. Wikipedia lacks real meat.
Well, Mr. Barratt is either completley oblivious or just likes to poke fun. In the very first “example,” he points out that the Call of Duty video game has more words than the entry for World War II. Ha ha, very funny, but does he have any idea that Wikipedia has length guidelines? There are hundreds, if not thousands of articles related to World War II, Barratt just didn’t bother to find that out. He combines the articles for all of the Call of Duty video games but doesn’t bother adding up the hundreds of articles for World War II.
Wikipedia seems to be everybody’s favorite whipping boy, but rarely do folks stop to take a good look at just how remarkable a resource and phenomenon it is.
Think Wikipedia is a second rate web site? Go ahead, try to write an article and get it to featured status. It’s probably easier to write a dissertation (thought I can’t say for sure, since I’ve never done either).
Note: This article cross-posted at Chickens Don’t Have Armpits.
Monday, 7. July 2008
Amen. It seems like Wikipedia always has some sort of pending negative press/commentary against it, but I use it all the time and haven’t really seen directly any major problem with it. It’s fantastic.
Monday, 7. July 2008
RAmen! You can find all kinds of interesting stuff there. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster
Saturday, 12. July 2008
Speaking as someone who yesterday spent several hours posting untrue information to various wikipedia entries, I’d say people should be very careful using wikipedia as a resource for anything other than what a bunch of geeks typed in.
Saturday, 12. July 2008
Congratulations, David, on spending several hours tearing down something that other people have built. It must make you feel very proud, very big, and very powerful.
Do not worry about the fact that a wiki saves every entry and change that is made. Do not worry that it is very easy to change from one saved version to another. So when these ‘geeks’ you speak of see that you are entering in bogus information, they will, with very little effort, revert every entry you made and block your account. Sure, you can spend another ’several hours’ messing things back up, but it will only take a few seconds to again undo your work.
This isn’t like vandalism, where it takes longer to fix the problem you spent minutes making. It’s the opposite. So feel smug, go mess up more, because that is why Wikipedia works. It is immune to your childish behavior.