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

[The Cunctator]

On 1/4/07, Robth <robth1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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).
>
> <snip>
>
> 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.
>
> Thanks for the serious response.

What I would say is that Wikipedia has worked remarkably well by letting
people who are not experts (i.e. just some internet guys) write imperfect
but well-intentioned articles at first.

Over time articles improve.

Sure, everyone's better off the better articles begin, but experience has
demonstrated that the seeds generally flower well, no matter how ugly they
look at first.