One of Wikipedia's problems

15 examples.

lol.

yeah... it's handy for a lot of things, it has very accurate science articles, but it's also very silly. wikipedia desperately needs an editor.

who remembers when wikipedia beat SG for the "best community" webby? feathers were fucking ruffled around here.

So, word count is a measure of importance now? I'm glad I finally got that memo.

I call bullshit on this argument, length is not an accurate measure of anything. In fact, Wikipedia has specific guidelines limiting the size of articles, with outbound links for more information. All of those articles mentioned have dozens of sections linked to them each with orders of magnitude more information than every CoD combined.

So what's stopping you?

This is a little skewed because the bulk of the topics with less 'word count' than the game have numerous associated sub-topics. Just the wikipedia descriptions of the various aircraft used in WWII would overwhelm the description of the video game. Today I read a description of an individual atrocity committed by the Nazi's during WWII that was fairly lengthy. So this is really a poor take on Wikipedia. It has other issues, but on a great many topics, a reasonably well educated person can find somewhat reliable first order information and a place to start digging for a more accurate picture.

BTW - if you will offer me a grant of say, 50k or so, I will research and count every word on Wikipedia related to WWII, double the grant and I will knock out all the other topics mentioned. Otherwise: FAIL

Uh, you guys get that the article was all in fun and not some Harvard study of the failings of Wikipedia, right?

I was serious about the 50k. I'll even throw in a humorous preface to the study.

Sans a grant, I have done an informal survey of the SG boards and have discovered to my horror that there are way more posts in the 'Fake Boobs' thread than there are in all of the Iraq War threads put together.

And it'd be funny if it were true, but it's not.

I don't know what you're talking about. I copy-paste all my papers...err I mean complete all my research using the always perfect, always accurate and more importantly, always available in the middle of the night on the last night before my work is due, Wikipedia. I swear by no other source!!

Besides, if we wrote more about vid games and less about war, does that make us a better or worse off?

How come they're allowed to add up all of the Call of Duty pages but not all of the tertiary World War II articles? There are pages for TONS of stuff directly related to World War II, like the causes of World War II, Nazi war crimes, WWII timeline, etc etc. I'm sure there's an article for every major military operation and battle that happened during the war, among other stuff.

OH HOLY FUCK AN ENTIRE VIDEO GAME FRANCHISE HAS MORE WORDS ON WIKIPEDIA THAN THE OUTLINE PAGE OF WORLD WAR II, WHICH LINKS TO WAY MORE INFORMATION THAN IT CONTAINS!

I'd also be willing to wager that the reason video game and comic book character articles are individually longer than scientific and historic articles is that people who care enough to research more serious subject matter are probably more concerned about indexing it and condensing articles for ease of research.

The great thing about wikipedia is it links its sources! So copy paste wikipedia, and cite someone else!

And then you can say "I liked it in my paper so much I put it in Wikipedia. Thats why its the same."