Wednesday, March 28, 2007

This Is Refreshing

I was surprised to stumble onto this article at Wikipedia: Why Wikipedia is not so great.

Here are some of my faves ...

1) The self-esteem of a bad writer with a fragile ego may be damaged by people always correcting horrible prose, redundancies, bad grammar and spelling. Especially if they do more than just correct, and lecture the poor person.

2) Articles tend to be whatever-centric. People point out whatever is exceptional about their home province, tiny town or bizarre hobby, without noting frankly that their home province is completely unremarkable, their tiny town is not really all that special or that their bizarre hobby is, in fact, bizarre. In other words, articles tend to a sympathetic point of view on all obscure topics or places.

3) The writing quality of some articles is terrible.

5 comments:

Dave said...

You are simply jealous that your online competition, Jaykapedia, never took off.

Jay said...

Why Jaykapedia was not so great:

1) All my articles were Dave-centric, pointing out what was exceptional about Dave and his bizarre hobbies.

Mike said...

Cool article to find! Maybe if people would make wikipedia their primary source of reference material they would learn to read with the proper amount of skepticism, and be ready to read the news. Here's a maxim to live by:

If it ain't on LBU,
It may or may not be true!

Joe said...

That's why I get all my info from 'Conservapedia' (http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page). It filters out all that liberal truthy bullshit.

For instance, here's all you need to know about Mexico:

"Mexico is a country south of the United States. Mexico is known for its poor economy, causing many of its citizens to immigrate illegally north to the U.S. to find work.

The states of Texas, New Mexico, California, and Arizona were part of Mexico until the Mexican American War. To this day, many U.S. citizens in the region speak Spanish as their native language.

Mexico is the source of most of the marijuana imported into the United States.

Jay said...

Truthy bullshit! Funny.