I have satisfied my curiosity that little has changed at Wikipedia in the last five years If anything the flagrant BS is even more deeply ingrained than ever before Take it away Tycho you prophet of the ages I Have The Power by Tycho Fri December 16 2005 07 58 AM As an encyclopedia Wikipedia has some issues As a model of how and where distributed intellect fails it s almost shockingly comprehensive When we were first considering making Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs available as a publicly manageable satirical metanarrative we dropped the basic timeline on Wikipedia because I liked the way their software went about things Of course a phalanx of pedants leapt into action almost immediately to scour from the sacred corpus of their data our revolting fancruft That s okay with me I wasn t aware they thought they were making a real encyclopedia for big people at the time and if I had I d have sought out one of the many other free solutions I had seen the unbelievably detailed He Man and Pok mon entries and assumed like any rational person would that Pok maniacs were largely at the rudder of the institution I am almost certain that while they prune their deep mine of trivia they believe themselves to be engaged in the unfolding of humanity s Greatest Working Responses to criticism of Wikipedia go something like this the first is usually a paean to that pure democracy which is the project s noble fundament If I don t like it why don t I go edit it myself To which I reply because I don t have time to babysit the Internet Hardly anyone does If they do it isn t exactly a compliment Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions The fact of the matter is that all sources of information are not of equal value and I don t know how or when it became impolitic to suggest it In opposition to the spirit of Wikipedia I believe there is such a thing as expertise The second response is the collaborative nature of the apparatus means that the right data tends to emerge ultimately even if there is turmoil temporarily as dichotomous viewpoints violently intersect To which I reply that does not inspire confidence In fact it makes the whole effort even more ridiculous What you ve proposed is a kind of quantum encyclopedia where genuine data both exists and doesn t exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information