> Wikipedia has a strong bias towards pop
> culture and contemporary subjects. The older a subject is, the less
> information there typically is in an entry.
It is no secret that the content of Wikipedia tends to reflect the interests of its contributors, and this demographic is skewed by a preponderance of middle-class, white, America males between the ages of 20 and 40, whose interests lean towards -- surprise, surprise -- popular culture, technology, and Euro-American current affairs. See this thoughtful comment on the issue of systemic bias on a user page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jmabel#On_systemic_bias
For example, the Peruvian contributors editing the Peruvian articles tend to be young college kids who are highly partisan and deeply reactionary. There is nothing accidental about this; only a tiny upper-middle/upper class segment of the population can afford broadband in a country like Peru. These people, who live almost exclusively in the wealthy enclaves of Lima, culturally identify more with Miami than Cusco.
> The other day I discovered an annoying grammatical problem on Wikipedia.
There is a lot of Bad Prose on Wikipedia. It may not be the most critical problem with the site, but it very pervasive. Did you see this piece?
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php
This guy was spot on, and his comments were a great embarrassment to the Wikipedia community. Fact is, a lot of contributors aren't good writers. That is OK, everyone can bring something useful to the table. But so typically articles get built up by an accretion of factoids by fly-by editors who resemble a thousand seagulls creating a mountain of guano, dropping by dropping. The worst offenders are those excrement is largely free of nutritive value; it is roughage, such as the endless amounts of trivia that gets dumped at essentially random locations in articles. You'll see this at its worst in articles on celebrities, like "Katie Holmes" and "Lindsay Lohan".
You'd think that the natural state of things would be a gradual improvement of articles over time, and in many cases this is so, but in others drive-by fact-dumping more often than not just creates bulk at the expense of narrative cohesiveness. A skilled editor will go in and reorganize and rewrite the article, turn it into an organic whole, but six months later that effort may be partly reversed. This issue is particularly acute with controversial articles, like "Noam Chomsky", where the editorial flow is degraded by constant efforts of partisans to introduce criticisms, defenses, rebuttals, alternate points of view (A says this..., but B says this...) and so on. It gives weight to that old saying "too many cooks spoil the broth".
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam