[WikiEN-l] What en:wp would look like printed out

[John Lee]

On 8/30/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> Adrian wrote:
> > Seriously, why can't we? We're getting swamped with fan-writing on all
> > sorts of topics, much of it related to popular culture.
>
> I just hit "random page" ten times. I got articles about:
>
> *disambiguation page for two shahs of Persia
> *a road in Cambridgeshire
> *a political party in Nicuragua
> *an Asterix and Obelix film
> *a primitive genus of civet-like hyena
> *a well-known victim of a gay-bashing murder in Canada
> *a taxon containing the placental mammals (factual accuracy disputed)
> *the debut solo album by the former White Zombie singer Rob Zombie
> *a line of Nash automobiles produced from 1932 until 1957
> *a Hindi film about homelessness in New York
>
> It's just a glimpse, of course, and doesn't take into account relative
> article size, but it doesn't look like Wikipedia is being "swamped" with
> fan writing. It would be interesting to see a more rigorous and
> statistically significant sampling of Wikipedia's coverage by area.
>
> Actually, thanks to categories, it might even be possible to get an
> exhaustive analysis of Wikipedia's subject area coverage. I wonder if
> anyone's done something like that before.


Good point. It's theoretically possible that a lot of the "in popular
culture" junk people complain about is in tacked-on trivia sections at the
end of articles, or gigantic "X in popular culture..." articles. The number
of articles may not necessarily reflect the actual composition of the
'pedia.

Johnleemk