<< Fictional Characters 3: Analyze This | Front Page | If you only read one review of William Empson's collected letters this week ... >>
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
More on Wikipedia
Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence
NEW YORK—Wikipedia, the online, reader-edited encyclopedia, honored the 750th anniversary of American independence on July 25 with a special featured section on its main page Tuesday.
[snip]
“In fact,” added [founder, Jimmy] Wales, “at three-quarters of a millennium, the USA has been around almost as long as technology."
(h/t)
Comments
The Onion is very funny, as always. But, I must confess, I use wikipedia all the time and I have yet to stumble on any of the really egregious howlers whose existence is implied by this parody. I’ve found disappointingly short stubs on topics you would think someone would have bothered about. OK, I’ve had one bad experience that I can remember: the entry on the ancient Athenian Assembly. It’s almost non-existent and contains the sentence: “Everyone would decide on the decision, majority’s rule.” What’s more, it’s not linked to another short (slightly better) entry on the Ecclesia (ancient Athens), which should be the same thing. (I should probably just sign-up and write a better entry my damn self, rather than complaining about it.) That’s really the only bad experience I’ve had with wikipedia. I’ve never read a comparatively long entry and felt that it was not adequate as a starting point on the way to wherever I was going, if anywhere.
(There’s an anecdote in the entry on the Ecclesia: “A gang of slaves, called Scythians, carrying ropes dipped in red ochre (miltos, hence Miltiades, i.e. the Red-Haired) would travel through the city on the days the Ecclesia was to meet, and would lash those citizens not in attendance with their ropes. With garments thus stained, shamed citizens could legally carry out no business until they visited the meeting grounds of the Ecclesia on the hill called the Pnyx.”
I don’t believe I’ve read that anywhere else, although I’ve read a couple books about ancient Greek politics in my time. But it’s probably true. I trust that it’s true - about the ropes and the ochre and all. Unless it’s just some made up crap. Anyone know?)
The ropes bit is joked about in the Acarnians of Aristophanes, where Dicaepolis, finding the assembly empty of the people, says “They are gossiping in the market-place, skipping hither and thither to avoid the vermillioned rope.”
Well, this topic was a particular pile of crap before someone (anonymously) did some work on it.
But, I must confess, I use wikipedia all the time and I have yet to stumble on any of the really egregious howlers whose existence is implied by this parody.
Oh, the real howlers do crop up from time to time. Here’s one from the article on decapitation: “There´s a heated argument about whether those who say that separation of the head from the rest of the human body results in death and those who contend their thesis, although statistical studies of survival rate lean against the latter group." (At the moment there’s a link from “those who contend their thesis” to an article on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow—either that’s a joke, or it isn’t. I’m not sure which of those options is preferable.)
There used to be a hoax article on WikiPedia about “Brian Torby,” leader of the dubious “League of Nigerian Liberation.” The hoax was eventually noticed, but not before the charming phenomenon of Wiki-kudzu had spread it to many of WikiPedia’s para-sites, ensuring that readers can thrill to Torby’s pseudo-Cromwellian adventures to this day.
Less entertainingly, WikiPedia’s general vulnerability to defacement by cranks has led to its making defamatory accusations against living people—as happened to [url="http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x.htm"]John
Siegenthaler[/url].
(All of the above via Matthew White.)
I have to say that Wikapedia is far from accurate. There is no process to validate information, and no compulsion by the ‘editors’ to get things right. A public wall would have more balance than Wikapedia!!