http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollaback_Girl

Nothing wrong with Wikipedia. It's an encyclopedia don't you know?

Meanwhile not everyone. thinks it should be an encyclopedia article

Do you have a point, or is this just more of the silly Wikipedia-bashing from the standpoint "it writes about trashy pop-cultural crap, so that proves it's just a heap of trash itself!" That's not a particularly original point; even the mainstream media (despite being full of trashy pop-cultural crap itself... why did CNN interrupt serious news stories to report on the latest developments in the Paris Hilton case?) has picked it up, and periodically comments on how Wikipedia has [bignum] articles on Pokemon characters, or how the Wikipedia article on [pick your favorite ditzy pop star] is longer and better-referenced than the article on [pick your favorite significant historical figure]. Personally, I see no problem with Wikipedia giving coverage to fluffy pop stuff (it's part of "all of human knowledge", after all)... though it ought to beef up its coverage of more serious stuff too.

No not at all. It demonstrates that Wikipedia is all about trivia, while it struggles mightily to write about serious subjects. I believe it was Andrew Orlowski who referred to it as "Jimbo's Big Bag 'O Trivia" and its accurate.

The greater reality is that being an authoritative source for trivia is not the same as an encyclopedia.

It's the endless parade of trivia that makes Wikipedia so fascinating. Anything that is remotely serious or refers to history - then that's where the fun begins because that's when consensus breaks down and cabals, extremists, revert wars, wheel wars, community bans and all sorts of fun and games begin.

In the end of course, the trivia is what will bring Wikipedia to its knees because of their high ranking with Google brings an ever increasing bandwidth cost that has to be paid for from somewhere.

I hate to say this, but you're both right, IMO. Wikipedia's most useful role is to cover stuff that you wouldn't find in a real encyclopedia... It's just a little galling to have them try to claim it's a "real encyclopedia," and to see real, peer-reviewed encyclopedias (and other reference materials) suffer from lower-quality free competition. Those publications play a key role in documenting our cultures, our languages, and the science and history of the planet, and Wikipedia is destroying them.

But all that aside, "Hollaback Girl" is actually a landmark recording in some ways... Time will tell as to whether it remains so, but at the moment at least, it probably qualifies. Certainly more than Bulbasaur, anyway.

Wikipedia likes to delete that stuff as non-notable. That's most of what they do.




This is something I really want to have Jimbo Wales respond to!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That sounds protectionist... hasn't every cultural and technical trend or change been objected to by some group that fears being put out of business as a result of it, from the buggy-whip manufacturers crowded out by the automobile, to the musicians threatened by player pianos and phonographs, to the recorded music industry threatened by Internet music downloads, to the movie industry threatened by television, to the television industry threatened by cable TV, to the movie, TV, and cable industries threatened by YouTube... and the beat goes on.

The early-20th-century objections of musician/composer John Philip Sousa to such innovations as player pianos and phonographs are particularly interesting in that his objection was that these devices would crowd out the profusion of amateur hobbyist musicmaking in homes all over in favor of people listening to the works of a few professional musicians, reducing the diversity of music. On the other hand, objections like yours to Wikipedia and other current "Web 2.0" stuff tend to be along the lines of them putting professionals out of business in favor of a disorganized bunch of amateurs doing things for fun out of their homes. Kind of a full circle there.

Of course. The issue is whether or not the new innovation represents an improvement over the old way of doing things. And in some of your examples, such as the automobile, what seemed like a huge improvement at first is now significantly contributing to the human race making the planet unlivable for itself.

I'm not saying there aren't some things about Wikipedia that aren't improvements, in some cases major improvements, over paper encyclopedias or even non-editable online ones (though the high degree of currency is probably the only significant WP improvement over, say, Britannica Online or even the MSN version of Encarta). Overall, though, I think it's a net loss to civilization, and it's one that might not be fully realized until it's already too late.


We probably give that aspect of it more ink than it deserves, simply because people can easily empathize with people who are losing their jobs, suffering income losses, or being denied creative opportunities... not to mention that there's a certain amount of natural disdain for people who would do significant amounts of work for free, in return for... what, exactly? Adminship on some website? That's what it looks like from where I'm standing.

I'd say the long-term effects are far more significant... It's just harder to convince people of them. I'm also of the opinion that the stated ideological rationale for WP, which usually goes along the lines of "we're trying to generate free content to challenge the bloated/unfair/corrupt system of copyright which inhibits creativity/learning/free-expression," is rather bogus. It suggests that there's nothing good at all about the idea of intellectual property, which is simply wrong, and that there's nothing bad about the alternative of free content, which is also wrong. Both of these things have good points and bad points...

The guiding principle should be Moderation in All Things, and that while too much of a good thing isn't always a Good Thing, too much of a bad thing is always a Bad Thing.

Or you know, whatever.

Many articles are cribbed from the 1911 Britannica and other old, out of copyright sources.

"Lower-quality free competition" is a funny way to put it, because free information is something so important that any source that provides it has, in one key respect, a huge advantage in quality over any source that doesn't. Anybody pining over traditional encyclopedias should recall their inaccessibility and fundamental elitism. Whether or not Wikipedia is lower-quality in other respects now, it certainly will not be with the passage of time, as it works to reference each and every fact and provides a much broader scope of content than the traditional encyclopedias. What do we lose if they go the way of the dinosaur? Nothing will go undocumented because they are gone; rather, vastly more things will be documented and it will all be freely accessible. Of course, if one is the type of person who doesn't believe information on "Hollaback Girl" should be available, then it would be a dark day indeed...until of course you need to look something up.

I find this last statement pretty funny, because I have a complete Encyclopedia Universalis (Britanica, but in French). I didn't buy it and I can't even say that it's mine. A girlfriend moved about ten years ago and didn't have space for it. She asked me if I could "keep" it for her. I haven't heard from the girlfriend since. And there it sits on my bookshelf.

I'll note that you don't say what the huge advantage in quality is over any source that doesn't....what doesn't it have?? When you get a buncha peeps who will work for free who get their info out whatever they happen to have in their bookshelves, often misunderstanding what is written there and often slipping in the odd statement which is completely unsourced and untrue, it seems to me that "Lower-quality free competition" is a pretty...um....polite way of putting it.



That's the WP party line, but what proof do you have that would suggest that this extremely hypothetical statement might actually be true?

When you take a big group of people and create a climate which tends to make life difficult for experts and then you ask this large group of people to create a "concensus", what you get usually is "what everybody thinks". When you consider that at one time "most people" thought that the World was flat, it would appear that there are obvious flaws in this reasoning...



I don't think that the person who made the initial post was complaining about the existence of the "Hollaback Girl (song)" article, as it is obviously an important part of this singer's....um....oeuvre, shall we say? However, putting it on the front page as an example of WP's finest work?.....That speaks volumes....

Doesn't that kind of prove the point? Rather than being universally accessible, encyclopedias are more accessible to people who happen to have enough free space to accommodate those bulky sets of volumes. They also need to have either spent the hundreds of dollars to purchase one, or else "lucked" into it by some other means (like having a girlfriend drop them off on you). And what that gets you is a single set of encyclopedias, in a single language, that becomes increasingly out-of-date over time. Meanwhile, Wikipedia is available for free in many languages, continually updated. You can see the comparative advantage there.

That's a fallacy. Encyclopedias have traditionally been available to the general public at the public library. Public schools usually have them in their libraries too. Most families in the middle-class neighborhood that I grew up in had an encyclopedia, even those who had to be on a budget. It used to be that an encyclopedia was just something that you had.

And in terms of my own situation, I haven't had contact with my girlfriend but I've heard through the grapevine that she remarried well. Her home is now about ten times the size of mine. She has space for this encyclopia : she just doesn't want it. If she wanted it, I'm sure that she would have asked for it by now. Or maybe her husband has a newer, nicer, encyclopedia.

This encyclopedia was part of her life when she was a single mother living in a housing project in the suburbs of Paris. Maybe it's not nice enough for her new life? The fact that a single mother living in the projects has an encyclopedia also says volumes about your theory....

The fact that Wikipedia is more current, or shall we say more correctly, au courante, is also not necessarily a good thing. My copy of Universalis doesn't have an entry for Crystal Gail Mangum or anything about that situation. The fact that WP has an entire article about this trainwreck which would cover several pages of a paper encyclopedia is hardly something that I would call an improvement in Man's eternal quest for knowledge...unless you're Perez Hilton, maybe....



Well, Sousa was right: it used to be that if you wanted to hear a certain piece of music, you had to either play it yourself and find someone else to play it. Every house had instruments and people knew how to play them. Modern recording technique even changes the way we hear professional musicians. Pros make wrong notes....and sometimes these wrong notes are what makes the entire recording. However, with modern technique, not only do we get perfect performances, we also get perfectly boring performances that all sound the same. That's why there is a current trend in classical music recording which seeks to go back to "direct recordings" without a lot of editing.

So, maybe giving disorganized amateurs, as you describe them, all of the power simply because the technique exists isn't necessarily a good idea...or even a necessary idea, since we've already seen that it's not always a good thing and that technically better is not always better....

So the new musical technology of Sousa's day was bad because it crowded out the amateurs in favor of professionals... and the new information technology of our day is bad because it's crowding out the professionals in favor of amateurs. The common thread seems to be "change and new technology are bad" rather than support of either amateurs or professionals.

It's not that the advances are necessarily bad. It's that the technology chosen is not always the best and sometimes leads to the destruction of the very thing that it is intending on documenting.

Sousa's prediction turned out to be true, with the advent of "on demand music, less people were inclined to jump through the hoops to learn how to play instruments themselves. Why play scales for hours every day when you can just turn the radio on?

Along the same lines, why bother to go to college, go through three or more degree programs, land a university job, get tenure, write years of academic articles and books and finally make your mark on your subject of choice when you can just start editing WP, make a thousand edits, pretend that you've earned those degrees and work your way up the ladder of the Cabal until you're part of the power structure itself?

....and if certain people hadn't smelt a rat, I dare say that this situation would still be going on...

In terms of technological advances, everybody knows that vinyl records had much better sound than CDs. I have friends who have systems which create digital recordings which have the warm, direct sound of the old analogical recordings. The problem is, in this day and age, when compressed mp3s and Ipod earphones are the rule, people can't hear the difference any more. So, the best and most innovative technology isn't being used because people can no longer tell the difference.

In the same way, people are so used to reading the information nuggets on WP that they no longer understand why they are unaceptable....and most people didn't bother to even consider what had to be done to make the older, stodgey, encyclopedias verifiable and reliable. They haven't bothered to even ask the question. Given the current level of advancement, there must be technologies which could immediately improve the overall quality of WP...indeed, Daniel Brandt proved this with his plagarism study.

These advances are not being used. So clearly, something else is happening here.

Change and new technologies? No, that's not what we're talking about at all. If you were able to understand the question, you might be closer to finding the answer.

One important question to consider is this: Does having the ability to put on a recording replace completely the ability to be able to play an instrument?

If you don't play an instrument, how can you know that your opinion is valid?

Hmm, Jonny asks a similar musical question in this post....

"Sock puppet armies" makes a world of sense to me....

Nonsense. Encyclopaedia Britannica comes on a couple of CDs, or probably now on one DVD, and I don't think it costs that much.

At the risk of being accused of spamming, Britannica's "Ultimate Reference Suite 2007 DVD" is selling for $32.99 US at amazon.com... Meanwhile, the Encarta Premium 2007 DVD is going for $36.99.

But wait - you can still buy the paper version of Britannica, and in fact there's even a new edition, also available from amazon.com - a steal at only $1,342.89!

Shipping costs must be murder for that thing...