NEWS: Wikipedia, Groaning, and The Shape of the World Around Us

dholokov said:

But Jedi Knights are fictional, whereas knights have existed and continue to exist currently.

Lode_Runner said:

Exactly - real knights are so much more relevant than fictional Jedi knights. Sir Elton can be my knight in shining armour anyday.

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

SockPuppet said:

Lode_Runner said:

dholokov said:

But Jedi Knights are fictional, whereas knights have existed and continue to exist currently.

Exactly - real knights are so much more relevant than fictional Jedi knights. Sir Elton can be my knight in shining armour anyday.

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

Does his knighthood increase his relevance to you?

Wikipedia has been accused of systemic bias, a tendency to cover topics in a detail disproportionate to their importance. Even the site's proponents admit to this flaw. In an interview with The Guardian, Dale Hoiberg, the editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica, noted:

people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. In the past, the entry on Hurricane Frances was more than five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street was twice as long as the article on Tony Blair.

This flaw has been the subject of a game known as "Wikigroaning", a term coined by Jon "DocEvil" Hendren of the website Something Awful. In the game, two articles (preferably with similar names) are compared: one about a serious subject and the other about a topic important only to a select group of fans. Critics of Wikipedia concede that the encyclopedia's coverage of pop culture does not impose space constraints on the coverage of more "serious" subjects. As Ivor Tossell noted:

That Wikipedia is chock full of useless arcana (and did you know, by the way, that the article on "Debate" is shorter than the piece that weighs the relative merits of the 1978 and 2003 versions of Battlestar Galactica?) isn't a knock against it: Since it can grow infinitely, the silly articles aren't depriving the serious ones of space.