Wikipedia needs a severe kick to the head

I understood Wikipedia when it started – I even applauded the idea.

A central database where people can find information about almost anything in the world, and one that would be constantly updated because it was online, and it was done by the people, for the people.

The idea of anyone having a set of encyclopaedia now seems unbelievable. Not just because of the rise of Wikipedia, but simply because the rate of change of information in the world we live in so huge, that a printed book would – most likely – be out of date in a year, if not sooner.

Even with historic information this might well be the case. With all the new methods and tools at humanity’s disposal, it is entirely possible we will find out that all the "facts" we "know for certain" about Ancient Rome (for example) are – in fact – entirely wrong and we need to rewrite the history books.

I entirely support the idea of keeping the combined knowledge of humanity on the web, for the reasons I detailed above and for one more – the expense of it.

A good set of 26 encyclopaedia can cost a fair amount of money, even upwards of £100. Which I know, doesn’t sound a lot for what you get, but if you consider what else you can buy with £100, and just how much crap there would be that you would never need to know about, you can (I hope) see that having information on line is a way better idea – you can look up what you need to know, when you need to know it.

Don’t get me wrong – there are times when you need actual books. If you have a doctor about to perform valve replacement surgery on you, you would probably hope that they had done some research other than just looking it up on Wikipedia. Same with lawyers and other professional people.

But for the vast majority of us just looking something up quickly (When did Columbo discover America? Was the Roosevelt Room named after Teddy or Frankie? Was Regan McNeil possessed or was she just feeling a little cross? Who was responsible for the attack on Michael Corleone?) then looking it up on line is perfectly acceptable and will probably get you the right answer. And, if you are still unsure, you can look it up across one or two sources, just to be certain. (Because I looked up who founded The Salvation Army once on Wikipedia and learned it was founded by "Tom is a homosexual and smells of wee" – which I am pretty sure wasn’t actually the right answer. If you are curious, it was – apparently – William and Catherine Booth).

And – under the general idea of full disclosure – I still use Wikipedia when looking up some things. As I said – when it isn’t anything important or anything I am going to be punished for getting wrong, Wikipedia is a good source for quickly finding things. However most of the time I do try to find two sources, because while it is a generally good source, there are things about it that are very, very bad.

Fact Checking

I came across an article about the murder of a young woman in Britain. When I read it, I could not believe the amount of things that were wrong in it. I knew they were wrong, because I was fairly well acquainted with the case in question, having been a very, very good friend of the victim when she was murdered.

I edited the talk page and listed a number of things that were wrong. I couldn’t actually provide any citations for this, because the murder was over thirty years ago and so – at the time – there was very little written on line about it. Plus – if I am honest – most of the things I knew, I knew because of my relationship with the victim, not because I had read them anywhere.

Well – I went back the next night, and found the original editor of the article saying he (she? No sex was given, so I am going with he simply because I do not want to write he/she over a dozen times – it looks stupid) – saying he would not apply any of my changes without citations and outside proof because it was against standards. I asked him where he had got his "outside proof" and citations from – since half of what he had written was bollocks – and he said that it was from various police reports and news articles, none of which were quoted at the bottom.

So – after pointing out that there were a fair number of mistakes, including the woman’s date of birth of all things – I asked him again if he would apply the changes and I was told that "my opinion" is not a valid source and I need to cite any sources to make them "valid"

(I have just gone back to the page, and it is still full of inaccuracies and mistakes, and the person who wrote the original article is still refusing to change it despite being told that there are a lot of mistakes).

Now – it might be this is an isolated incident, but if there are this many problems in one article, and the article’s creator is so unwilling to listen to any one else or to provide any type of citation to support his stuff then how do I know that all the other articles are held to a higher standard? That the other articles aren’t equally full of mistakes and other such things? 

WikiPedia tries to hold itself up as being a valuable source of knowledge, with all of the facts verified and checked, and yet it could be that page after page goes unchecked and unnoticed.

And when you try to do something about it – you try to fix an article based on knowledge you KNOW to be true – you are told that "your opinion is not a valid source so we’re going to ignore it".

Which sounds fair enough – they only want validated and checked information so that it is a good source of knowledge. But when the original article has no sources and no fact checking and is FULL of mistakes, what does that say about their fact checking then?

"Style" Guides.

I swear there is a twenty line debate about whether the word "pope" should be capitalised or not.

When saying "Benedict was speaking as the pope" should it be "Benedict was speaking as the Pope"? 

And possibly the single most famous example of this in recent times is the "Star Trek Into Darkness" debate. Somewhere between four and five THOUSAND words were used to debate whether Wikipedia should refer to it as "Star Trek into Darkness" or "Star Trek Into Darkness" based on Wikipedia style guides.

The fact that the film is called "Star Trek Into Darkness" by the production company doesn’t seem to matter. to the people on Wikipedia – they are the final arbiters of the title of the film, and will ignore anything that does not fit in to their world view.

The same can be said of Gone With The Wind – the book makes it clear that "With The" is captilized, but Wikipedia thinks it knows better and should be allowed to decide what the title of the film is regardless of what the original author wanted.

Firstly – would take the word of the originator of a work (book/film/play/etc) since they are the ones that created it and probably have the best idea.

Secondly – does it actually matter? If I see an article with a title "Gone With The Wind" am I going to

think "Oh my god – what is that about?" No – of course I’m not. I’m going to think "That’s about the book or the movie or the musical or the stage play or whatever other format it is". Which is the action of appending "film" or "book" or "tv show" is a very useful thing to do.

And if I see someone talking as "the pope" or "the Pope" am I going to wonder if Benedict had a second job as another type of Pope? Well, again, I am forced to say "of course not" because when you say Pope Benedict it is fairly obvious you are referring to the time Cardinal R was head of The Catholic Church. And when you are in an article that is entitled "POPE BENEDICT" then it becomes even more obvious.

I can not see a single purpose to "the style guide" other than to make Wikipedia seem more formal and more official.

And all it actually does it make them look more smug and full of themselves. "Look at us – we do it like this, aren’t we great?"

The amount of time people spend editing the tiniest of things (pope vs Pope, into vs Into) is truly amazing, and it doesn’t change the actual information – it just makes the people doing it look like twats.

Images

There is an article about Hen Nights. I looked it up trying to find out why it was called "A Hen Night" because – well because I wanted to know.

And in the "talk" section of the article there were a number of discussions about whether various photographs represented a "typical" hen night and whether or not the photographs were actually of hen nights, or if they were pictures of something else (and so not allowable under the rules).

Apparently the latest picture – a group of grown women in school girl uniforms – wasn’t acceptable because one poster didn’t think it was actually of a hen night.

(Clearly he hasn’t been to Blackpool during The Summer Season – or possible the summer season, depending on the style guide of Open Diary)

By the way – this photo was replaced with a picture of a woman dancing on a bar with a few other women watching her. And – again, based on the summer season in Blackpool – this happens in nearly every pub and nightclub in town whether there is a hen party on or not.

Meanwhile, there are other discussions about why "what people have seen on their hen nights" and "what people have seen" isn’t allowed, despite the fact it is fairly common in some places (L Plates for example. They are so common that when a guy at my last job said he was going to do this for a stag party, he got the piss taken out of him for six months afterwards).

It is – once again – an attempt to be better than it is, and to make it seem like it is an official source of knowledge, when all it is is a group of people putting information on the web for others to read.

In summary, I would say that Wikipedia once was good idea, but that it has become too big for itself and the people who edit it don’t seem to understand that they are just one more person posting their opinion on a subject they know something about. Instead, they seem to think they are imparting the WORD OF GOD and anyone who argues with them is not worth the treatment they would give to something they found on the sole of their shoe.

You have articles that have no citations that are full of mistakes, and yet when you say something is wrong they DEMAND a citation before changing it.

You have people arguing about "style" instead of caring about the substance of the article.

You have people saying "well – that’s not what happens in the USA so clearly we don’t want it in the article" or "That’s not what happens in my town so it must be wrong"

All in all, Wikipedia has become what everything that is done by committee eventually becomes – a huge ludicrous beast of a thing that spends more time arguing about minute details and irrelevant nonsense than actually making sure it is serving a purpose.

The people who edit it are more interested in defending their own articles than listening to anyone else’s opinion, and create a climate of – for want of a better phrase – fear for anyone wanting to make changes. Everything has to be discussed ad nauseum if a change is required, with objections coming because the original suggestion wasn’t phrased in the right way, or didn’t use the correct grammar.

Like I said – for looking up facts that I don’t really care if they are right or wrong, it is still quite a useful source. But for actual facts, I am going to start going to other sources and websites.

And I know – they might not be right, but on the whole, I would rather trust other sites run by random strangers who just want to get information out, rather than trusting a site run by random strangers who seem to want to get their names out.