> 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
This shouldn't surprise anybody. I think that most of the juvenile behavior I encounter from Wiki-zealots can be chalked up to the fact that they are young white males. I just can't see the same behavior out of most women or older men.
> 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.
Interesting.
> 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".
Many of the articles are readable and have a consistent tone. There are lots of bad articles in Wikipedia. Far more than Wikipedians and Wiki-zealots would want to admit. Their refrain is that articles are seen by many eyes and are thus improved over time. This is true to some extent, but I would guess that most of the readers of Wikipedia have no editing skills or no interest in changing entries.
The articles that fall outside of the pop culture interests of the young male demographic and the entries that are non-controversial, are generally pretty valuable.
> 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.
One annoying thing that I recently found in the hundreds of movie entries I recently went through is a preoccupation with box office receipts. Entries on popular movies sometimes have longer sections on how the movie did at the box office than the section on plot summary. I've run across entries with no cast or production credits. Most of the entries have information that looks like it was simply cut and pasted from Internet Movie Database. There are few, if any, references to academic books and articles.
I often get the impression that Wikipedia is mostly edited by people who watch lots of TV and have little to no intellectual life. Wikipedia is like a reference book for people who have no books in their house.
> 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".
The Chomsky article can be pretty good when it isn't being defaced by right-wing whackjobs. The problem is that some of these article either need to be frozen at some point, or news edits have to go through some kind of process. Readers of my blog know about my struggle with the anarcho-capitalist wingnuts who have been vandalizing the "anarchism" entry for years. These guys may have finally run out of steam--two of them recently were sanctioned by Wikipedia and were warned that they face permanent suspensions. You just can't write accurate entries on contentious topics if you have to deal with these teenage boys who have nothing better to do than vandalize entries all day.
Chuck