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The newest fad in Wikipedia is adding multiple quotes in each article. Then articles are not concise anymore, but full of "X said" irrelevant garbage. I think

by rvba 5y ago

The newest fad in Wikipedia is adding multiple quotes in each article. Then articles are not concise anymore, but full of "X said" irrelevant garbage. I think that often this is self promotion. Ive seen articles where there is a short text and 5 long quotes - that could be summed up with 2 or 3 sentences. Now try yo clean this up without an edit war...

Kim_Bruning 5y ago
That could be one of 2 or 3 things. Can you link an example or 2?
- rvba 5y ago
  Concerning the self promotion - I will unfortunately not provide you the link, because that would lead to you learning the name of my Wikipedia account. For your information: I tried to remove the quotes - by making 3 concise sentences. At this time I see that someone already added back - but this time the whole bulk of the text (so again not keeping it short). The bulk of the text is explaining who are the quoted people. It starts with a famous professor from university X, who said Y. Then there are two "randoms" quoted with their full titles and positions (they are not professors, but random PHDs from Y) - who are probably trying to self promote, since they have an opinion on something - that got quoted on Wikipedia. As for the trend about adding quotes to articles. This partially depends on taste - what each person likes, or dislikes. In my opinion there is a lot of value when an encyclopedia entry is concise synthesis of relevant information - so generally no quotes, just inline text. I dont care that X said this, Y said that, Z said something else - with full quotes. This can be rewritten to be concise with quotes in footnotes. I also dont care about barely relevant stories - that make the articles longer and full of worthless trivia. Here is an example of some random article that I found some time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_beetle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_beetle [disclaimer: I never edited it, just stumbled upon it] The article is about ground beetles, yet it has: 1) a "story" consisting of a long quote how Charles Darwin was hit in his eye by a bombardier beetle and it hurt. Multiple sentences of fluff 2) Even later, is an even more nonsensical quote, which sounds like some sort of fan service related to Darwin: "No poet ever felt more delight at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing in Stephen's Illustrations of British Insects the magic words, "captured by C. Darwin, " I have nothing against Charles Darwin, but how is his eye story relevant to an article about ground beetles? Shouldnt the article text focus on well... nettles and then simply have a "fun fact" section at the end, that would say: Charles Darwin got once hit in his eye by a beetle? Unfortunately with the current trend of adding such quotes it is really difficult to remove them. I dont even bother to try - someone will immediately revert this, because such quotes supposedly make the articles more fun (for 12 year olds?). More and more articles are full of such fluff. I have nothing against having a "fun fact" section, but seriously, quotes inside bulk of articles are such a waste of time.

by rvba 5y ago

Kim_Bruning 5y ago

That could be one of 2 or 3 things. Can you link an example or 2?

rvba 5y ago
Concerning the self promotion - I will unfortunately not provide you the link, because that would lead to you learning the name of my Wikipedia account. For your information: I tried to remove the quotes - by making 3 concise sentences. At this time I see that someone already added back - but this time the whole bulk of the text (so again not keeping it short). The bulk of the text is explaining who are the quoted people. It starts with a famous professor from university X, who said Y. Then there are two "randoms" quoted with their full titles and positions (they are not professors, but random PHDs from Y) - who are probably trying to self promote, since they have an opinion on something - that got quoted on Wikipedia. As for the trend about adding quotes to articles. This partially depends on taste - what each person likes, or dislikes. In my opinion there is a lot of value when an encyclopedia entry is concise synthesis of relevant information - so generally no quotes, just inline text. I dont care that X said this, Y said that, Z said something else - with full quotes. This can be rewritten to be concise with quotes in footnotes. I also dont care about barely relevant stories - that make the articles longer and full of worthless trivia. Here is an example of some random article that I found some time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_beetle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_beetle [disclaimer: I never edited it, just stumbled upon it] The article is about ground beetles, yet it has: 1) a "story" consisting of a long quote how Charles Darwin was hit in his eye by a bombardier beetle and it hurt. Multiple sentences of fluff 2) Even later, is an even more nonsensical quote, which sounds like some sort of fan service related to Darwin: "No poet ever felt more delight at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing in Stephen's Illustrations of British Insects the magic words, "captured by C. Darwin, " I have nothing against Charles Darwin, but how is his eye story relevant to an article about ground beetles? Shouldnt the article text focus on well... nettles and then simply have a "fun fact" section at the end, that would say: Charles Darwin got once hit in his eye by a beetle? Unfortunately with the current trend of adding such quotes it is really difficult to remove them. I dont even bother to try - someone will immediately revert this, because such quotes supposedly make the articles more fun (for 12 year olds?). More and more articles are full of such fluff. I have nothing against having a "fun fact" section, but seriously, quotes inside bulk of articles are such a waste of time.