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'The insultingly vacuous and frankly bizarre prose of the content farms — it seems ripped from Wikipedia and translated from the Romanian — cheapens all online
by ez77 15y ago
'The insultingly vacuous and frankly bizarre prose of the content farms — it seems ripped from Wikipedia and translated from the Romanian — cheapens all online information.'
I doubt any decent translation would turn a random Wikipedia article into vacuous prose. The style may generally be cold, maybe 'soulless' (encyclopedic?), but more often than not there's a good amount of information and, more importantly, relevant sources.
- Joakal 15y agoI think it was referring to copying content from wikipedia, translating it into a different language and then back into English. Probably one of the reasons for google to reduce the manipulation by taking down the translate API.
- tokenadult 15y agomore often than not there's a good amount of information and, more importantly, relevant sources Relevant sources "more often than not" on Wikipedia? As a Wikipedian, I have to disagree, based on my personal knowledge of what the stream of newly submitted articles looks like, what the articles identified for Guild of Copy Editors attention look like, and what long-standing articles on my watch list look like. I confess that I don't have a published source to back up my statement (or refute yours). Presumably, there is some legitimate ground for debate on what is a "relevant" source for a particular article. I do note that the Wikimedia Foundation itself thinks more work still needs to be done on improving article quality. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_Priorities#Improve_Content_Quality http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P... One other thing I notice is how little uptake there is from source lists posted in userspace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol... into the related articles. Most editor discussions I see on a variety of article talk pages revolve around "I don't believe this," or "You miswrote this" much more than "What's a relevant source about this?" Perhaps you read mostly articles about different subjects from the articles I read on Wikipedia, and I'd love to hear about examples of articles with good sourcing in general.
- ez77 15y agoThanks for your reply. I guess I was thinking of low-controversy articles such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System , but given your background I'm sure your perception is closer to reality than mine.
- skybrian 15y agoMore work always needs to be done, but you might be getting a skewed view of things by looking at problem articles. What happens if you pick a random sample of articles weighted by how many page views they get? That's closer to what the average reader sees.
- bastiat 15y agoWikipedia is a sap on human understanding. You may pretend that is important, but it is not.