Wikipedia: the good, the bad, and the unbearable
Wikipedia — wow, what a thing. An encyclopedia anyone can edit… and “anyone” does edit it. Certainly it’s a pandora’s box, and Wikipedia itself has an article (probably biased) on Criticism of Wikipedia…
To me, Wikipedia does have some good: it can be a great resource for topics regarding popular culture — TV shows, musicians, Internet memes, slang phrases, etc. In these cases, you can go there to learn what the fans and folks on the street think about the topic… which is often what you’re looking for. You’re not after a scholarly academic paper on subjects like that. And I often find myself looking for the “External links” at the bottom of these articles, because the fans might know the best sites on the topic better than Google does.
I have written a few articles entirely from scratch on worthy topics that I’m somewhat knowledgeable about. For the most part, those articles haven’t been negatively tampered with; probably because they aren’t very controversial or particularly popular. Sometimes someone will make an edit that I would not have made: but unless it is factually inaccurate, I just leave those be. They might not have improved the article, but hey, it’s a freely editable site, and if they took the time to make the edit, they must have felt fairly confident about the need to do it. I can’t police the thing day in and day out, and don’t want to.
When I say I can’t police it, that’s because I don’t really have the time and wherewithall. But Wikipedia does provide the tools needed to police articles, and you can sign up to be notified about even the slightest change. Then, with the click of one button and no need to justify your action, you can undo anything anyone else does.
In the end, it means that the person who controls the knowledge about a given subject on Wikipedia is the person who has the most time on their hands to police and monitor the page in question. Unfortunately, most of the “best” kind of people in the world, frankly, have better things to do with their time… and thus, Wikipedia gets left to the trolls and dungeon dwellers.
Yeah, I know, I’m not being fair. There’s probably a good Wikipedia policeman somewhere who does good work and prevents bad edits, and maybe they should be commended for their vigilance. But so far, most of the times I’ve come across the “police,” they have tended to be assertive jerks with extreme biases who are unwilling to allow any shred of differing opinion to creep into the pages they are monitoring, no matter how level-headed and thoroughly referenced it is.
Today, the frustration has been noting that in a certain article, the Wikipolice have been editing out references to actions taken by certain people — actions reported and referenced to major media outlets — because they (the Wikipolice in question) do not personally approve of those actions. Well, just because you don’t like that it happened doesn’t mean it did not happen. But there’s little that can be done — you can try to get into an “edit war” about it, but eventually, chances are, you’re going to have something better to do and as soon as you leave, your work on the article will be permanently undone.
I wish Wikipedia would come up with some sort of solution to the problem… perhaps some way to flag a disputed change — to ring the bell and send the combatants back to their corners — and then put it up for a vote or something along those lines…
