The I Hate Wikipedia Blog - Criticisms and Reviews: Recent Comments

Comment on More Misery

Nanabozho — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:07:05 GMT

I'm complaining that the source requirement is used by what are called deletionists. Proving something is accurate is not necessarily the highest goal. We are not all librarians or college writing professors, and we don't write like they do or have their standards. We are the average people. Librarians and college writing professors don't have websites as successful as Wikipedia is. I think the goal here is information and lots of it.

And there is an alternative to relying on sources. I watch the Wikipedia articles about my local cities. I look at any changes made and ask myself is this accurate and an improvement? I'd say these local articles are pretty accurate, because myself and a some others have written them and haven't found anything wrong with what others have wrote. I believes it's this Wikipedian process that makes their site successful, while Librarians and college writing professors are still waiting for their sites to take off.

We have all been taught to source our work, and did it in order to get a passing grade, then we never did again, unless required to. The majority of writers for Wikipedia, probably feel the way I do about this. They give good quality, but are weak on sources.

I am predicting that Wikipedia will evolve away from the source requirement, because it works well enough and will be successful as measured by site traffic. An accuracy requirement if set too high, can kill something. "Wiki" some people say, means quick. I think quick is more important than sources. Do people go through their day, asking everyone they talk to, to source what they just said? Annoying people do. People will accept Wikipedia if it's pretty accurate.

Comment on More Misery

John — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 12:07:17 GMT

May I note that if an article doesn't have sources, there is no way to prove it's right. So you're complaining that wikipedia is too accurate. Wow...

Comment on Public Service Commercial and Wikiality

magus dee — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:50:30 GMT

To me, the most stunning accomplishment of Wikipedia is to draw unto itself an apparently endless supply of Little Hitlers who voluntarily monitor endlessly the individual entries which serve as personal fiefdoms--as if it were their duty in life to stand sentry for ownership and censor even the most mundane additions to entries, as if they were in the employ of Goebbels and Co., protecting the Reich from gypsies, homosexuals, and intellectual Jews. No doubt in my mind that these volunteer editors are the types who watch neighbors through binoculars and learn to lip-read, just in case "relevant information" can be gleaned, information to pass along to the ruling powers, information to be used for possibly punitive measures in Star Chambers worldwide. Wretched, this phenomenon, a true harbinger of the negative zeitgeist of the dismal century-in-progress, part and parcel of Orwell's vision of the future: "A boot kicking a human face forever."