[WikiEN-l] Thousands of *awful* articles on websites

[Robth]

On 1/4/07, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/4/07, Robth <robth1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  And
> > the article they write will be, as a result, bad and inaccurate.
>
>
> Why so?
>
> Evidence?

Bad, inaccurate sources=bad, inaccurate article.  To pick an example
I'm familiar with, here's are the first five non-Wikipedia google
results for the first major article I ever did for Wikipedia,
[[Epaminondas]] (filtering out totally off-topic or near-duplicate
results).

http://www.fordham.edu/HALSALL/ANCIENT/nepos-epam.html
-Ancient primary source of dubious validity.  Usable only with input
from reliable modern sources.

http://www.in2greece.com/english/historymyth/history/ancient/epaminondas.htm
-Utterly atrocious page written by Some Internet Guy, containing
numerous inaccuracies.

http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=haaren&book=greece&story=epaminondas
-Dramatized story of the man's life.  Glosses over critical aspects,
quite inaccurate on some points.

http://www.nndb.com/people/812/000095527/
-Best of the lot, but contains numerous inaccuracies and omissions.
>From the second page of google

http://www.lbdb.com/TMDisplayLeader.cfm?PID=5744
-Short

You could write an article from these sources.  It would omit numerous
important points, and would probably also include numerous untruths.
Such an article would be, in my opinion, worse than nothing.  And I
have seen sites like these used as the basis history articles; here's
one of my favorites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Methuselah&oldid=71757344
-Article bloated with dubious speculations drawn from the internet
(not all of them directly cited, but google shall reveal for those
that aren't) and of course, the requisite In Popular Culture section.
And actually, looking back, my rather timid cleanup probably wasn't
sufficient.

That's obviously a pretty susceptible article, but it isn't the only
example, just the one that jumped to mind for me, and I can't convince
myself that the belief (inherent in the edits that produced that page)
that Wikipedia is a place to put information you found on the internet
doesn't in some part stem from the fact that we have a number of
articles that are, well, a place to put stuff you found on the
internet.

-- 
Robth
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)