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I agree with the thrust of your comment, but the bit about "clickbait" is misplaced. Is is clearly a poetic metaphor - no-one clicking on the article seriously
by caf 10y ago
I agree with the thrust of your comment, but the bit about "clickbait" is misplaced.
Is is clearly a poetic metaphor - no-one clicking on the article seriously believed that Wikipedia has a literal biological cancer (the "cancer" metaphor is hardly a new one, if any criticism can be made here it would be that it is almost verging on cliche). Indeed the entire article is structured around this metaphor - the title is hardly false advertising.
I disagree strongly with this new obsession that every article title and headline must be written as pure "Man Bites Dog" factual summary, particularly for opinion pieces like this. Surely there is room for some attempt at poetic flair.
(A hypothetical example of a real "clickbait" style headline for this article might be "Google Will Buy Wikipedia").
- janwillemb 10y ago> A hypothetical example of a real "clickbait" style headline for this article [...] You forgot the obligatory "this" in the title. Better would be: This Is Why Google Will Buy Wikipedia
- elect_engineer 10y agoWere you aware that the vast majority of both the WMF board of directors and the WMF top management have close ties to Google? Or that a large chunk of those millions that the WMF has been spending went to creating a secret search engine? https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wikipedias-secret-google-competitor-search-engine-is-tearing-it-apart https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wikipedias-secret... Please note that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... is the origiginal essay, and the version in the Signpost has been modified at the request of the Signpost editors.