[lbo-talk] Wikipedia: demographics and prose style

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sun Feb 26 07:49:39 PST 2006


Colin wrote:


> On 2/23/06, Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
>
>> 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

About foreign leftists, sometimes, you find entries on them in a foreign-language wiki that do not exist in the English-language one: e.g., Albin Köbis and Max_Reichpietsch, leaders of the German sailors' rebellion against WW1 in 1917, cannot be found in the English wiki but they exist in the German wiki (though their entries are very short):

<http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albin_Köbis> <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Reichpietsch>

There is an entry on Ito Noe, a Japanese anarchist feminist, in the English wiki, but the excellent entry on her in Japanese has a lot more information about her life, her work, and works about her (which are the best part of the entry).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ito_Noe> <http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/伊藤野枝>

Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>



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