From: Michael Turley michael.turley@gmail.com
I'm not a fan of random degeneration, but I also don't subscribe to the view that this is what is occuring. I think that just as people know good writing when they see it, you and I will know a good edit on articles on our watchlist.
I am troubled by what I'll call "persistent cruft injection" and I think it is a real problem. Two that have impinged on me:
One is the use of names for large numbers--names that don't appear in dictionaries, aren't in real use, and are neologisms or hypothetical curiosities or useless extensions of systematic naming patterns. Back in second grade all us nerdy types enjoyed knowing the names of bigger numbers than our peers knew, but we ought to have outgrown that. Nevertheless there is a persistent tendency to add "googolquadruplex" and "brontobyte" and "zebibyte" and so forth. They are added typically by anons, and, I think, different anons. They don't care to read through previous discussions or reasons why certain words should or should not be added or how they should be described. They know (or think they know) the name of a bigger number than any other contributor has yet added to the article, so in it goes.
Another is academic boosterism. Virtually every article about any major university seems to have a continuing tendency to accumulate more and more braggadocio. I see that Harvard, for example, now contains as its second sentence "It is widely considered one of the finest academic institutions in the world." U. S. News and World Report rankings keep filtering in to university articles, and if an institution does not rank high in that listing, then other listings in which it does rank highly ("Washington Monthly," anyone?) will be used instead. Conversely, any information that is perceived as being negative gets removed. Sometimes you can get temporary agreement that a particular paragraph has gotten a little over-the-top, but it doesn't do much good because a few months later someone else decides that if Yale is going to mention how many Nobel laureates it has graduated, then they had better, too.
The contrast between university articles in Wikipedia and their counterparts in traditional encyclopedias is dramatic. Ours read like admissions-office brochures.
Jason Scott's comments were very unpleasant, but his reference to how one moves from creating content to _defending_ content has a ring of truth to it.
It is difficult to form a stable consensus when there isn't a stable community within which to form one.
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
I see that Harvard, for example, now contains as its second sentence "It is widely considered one of the finest academic institutions in the world."
The last list I saw, the Chinese survey, went 1. Harvard 2. Cambridge, 12-1 bar these two. Or something.
Of course there shouldn't be POV in those articles, or unsourced tendentious assertions, any more than elsewhere. Do we have articles on 'prestige surveys'?
Charles
I would consider that to be a statement as non-controversial as "Shakespeare has the reputation as one of the greatest of all writershttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writerin the English language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language and in Westernhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_worldliterature, as well as one of the world's pre-eminent dramatists" from our Shakespeare article.
It is for example at #1 at the US News & World Report list of America's best colleges see http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/natudoc/tier1/t1natu...
The Times Higher Education Supplement ranked it as the #1 university in the world see http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,591-1343946,00.html
They could be cited in support of the statement and possibly should be but the original statement about Harvard seems fair enough.
Regards
Keith Old User: Capitalistroadster On 10/30/05, charles matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I see that Harvard, for example, now contains as its second sentence "It is widely considered one of the finest academic institutions in the world."
The last list I saw, the Chinese survey, went 1. Harvard 2. Cambridge, 12-1 bar these two. Or something.
Of course there shouldn't be POV in those articles, or unsourced tendentious assertions, any more than elsewhere. Do we have articles on 'prestige surveys'?
Charles
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Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
The contrast between university articles in Wikipedia and their counterparts in traditional encyclopedias is dramatic. Ours read like admissions-office brochures.
The same goes for company articles. [[Coca-Cola]] reads like an advertising brochure where someone has -- here and there -- inserted some disclaimers that not all of this stuff might actually be true.
Chris