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If you have a topic whose entire history consists of a bounded, publicly-observable, enumerable series of events with clearly-defined consequences, then odds ar
by quant18 17y ago
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.
- jacobolus 17y agoMore 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.