At one point I remember Matter Eater Lad (comic book character, in case you haven't heard of him) having a more extensive entry than Catholicism (religion, in case you haven't heard of it).
That's just a bad comparison, you'd need to compare something like the DC universe to Catholicism because each schism, saint, pope etc. would get their own page just like each character, writer, film adaptation.
Often long articles are a sign of neglect: "I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter." -- Blaise Pascal
If you have a topic whose entire history consists of a bounded, publicly-observable, enumerable series of events with clearly-defined consequences, then odds are that topic will have a good Wikipedia article. Why? Because those topics are easy to research and don't have much for editors to disagree about.
Sports results and things that happened to characters in TV shows are two examples of this. Lists of discovery dates of minor planets are a third example.
Of course, the third example never comes up in this kind of "Wikigroaning". No blogger seems to characterise writing about lumps of rock in space as a moral failing. And certainly no one assumes that editors who can make lists of rocks in space are fungible with the editors who can write about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's influence on the U.S. legal system.
More than that, popular TV shows and sports teams have millions of avid fans who carefully track their trajectories. There are (sadly?) far fewer collectors of Ginsburg-opinion trivia than of The Simpsons trivia or NY Yankees trivia. A lot more of the average daily newspaper or TV news broadcast is also devoted to sports and TV shows than to the Supreme Court.
In response to the article: who cares? If you think Ginsburg’s article is too short, go research her for a few weeks or months and write a better 5000 word or 10000 word version. Having crap you don’t care about described in loving detail somewhere on Wikipedia isn’t going to hurt you, as long as it doesn’t get taken so excessively far that none of it can be verified.
Ah, the importance we assign to length – because in the past all that stuff had actually to be printed.
Just remember to not read anything into the length of Wikipedia articles. That’s all. Then you will notice that the Ginsburg article is perfectly alright, longer than most of the stuff you will find in printed encyclopedias and maybe in need of some focus.
Wikipedia simply reflects the fact that nearly everyone spends far more time thinking about TV series or sports evens than about any single real person (except perhaps close family and friends, and fake stands-ins for these, i.e. media celebrities).
This should not be a surprise to anyone. The interesting question is why this is the case and whether it is in fact lamentable.
Why does not one of the many, many people who point out this amusing imbalance in Wikipedia take the next logical step:
Either we force people to write only about the things that we think are worthy, or we actively prevent people from writing about the things we think are unworthy. Alleged "problem" solved.
Generally notability and worthiness aren't correlated. You get really popular trash, and really obscure genius.
The deletionist/inclusionist debate is orthogonal to whether a notable judge should have more words written about her than a notable item of low-brow and/or popular culture.
This is a popular rhetorical argument from people who like to point to amusing discrepancies in their (mis)understanding of Wikipedia, but it's only by fudging the difference between worthy and notable that it even begins to make sense. Maybe "don't delete my obscure thing, look here's something else you've never heard of that is allowed in Wikipedia" doesn't have the same persuasive force as "don't deleted my obscure thing, look here's something you definitely have heard of but which you consider to be in some way stupid, inferior or low-class", even if it's logically flawed.
12 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 45.6 ms ] threadThe number of words is proportional to the imagined worth of a person by the contributors of wikipedia?
Or is it that the contributors of wikipedia maybe just know more about Lost than they do about Ruth Ginsburg?
.joe
Often long articles are a sign of neglect: "I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter." -- Blaise Pascal
Ick.
Sports results and things that happened to characters in TV shows are two examples of this. Lists of discovery dates of minor planets are a third example.
Of course, the third example never comes up in this kind of "Wikigroaning". No blogger seems to characterise writing about lumps of rock in space as a moral failing. And certainly no one assumes that editors who can make lists of rocks in space are fungible with the editors who can write about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's influence on the U.S. legal system.
In response to the article: who cares? If you think Ginsburg’s article is too short, go research her for a few weeks or months and write a better 5000 word or 10000 word version. Having crap you don’t care about described in loving detail somewhere on Wikipedia isn’t going to hurt you, as long as it doesn’t get taken so excessively far that none of it can be verified.
Just remember to not read anything into the length of Wikipedia articles. That’s all. Then you will notice that the Ginsburg article is perfectly alright, longer than most of the stuff you will find in printed encyclopedias and maybe in need of some focus.
This should not be a surprise to anyone. The interesting question is why this is the case and whether it is in fact lamentable.
Either we force people to write only about the things that we think are worthy, or we actively prevent people from writing about the things we think are unworthy. Alleged "problem" solved.
Who determines what is worthy and what isn't? They already have this problem, expiring pages despite people protesting their validity.
The deletionist/inclusionist debate is orthogonal to whether a notable judge should have more words written about her than a notable item of low-brow and/or popular culture.
This is a popular rhetorical argument from people who like to point to amusing discrepancies in their (mis)understanding of Wikipedia, but it's only by fudging the difference between worthy and notable that it even begins to make sense. Maybe "don't delete my obscure thing, look here's something else you've never heard of that is allowed in Wikipedia" doesn't have the same persuasive force as "don't deleted my obscure thing, look here's something you definitely have heard of but which you consider to be in some way stupid, inferior or low-class", even if it's logically flawed.