Feminist SF Wiki talk:Wikipedia

issues with wikipedia: the branding of wikipedia is perhaps a valid complaint with wikipedia, but it isn't what drove me (as an individual) to create fsfwiki. ... it seems more like a generic critique of wikipedia. ... however, is it what drives some people to contribute to fsfwiki instead of wikipedia? LQ 11:59, 6 June 2006 (PDT)

The branding is part of what has distorted Wikipedia's implementation away from scholarship and towards unsupported trivia and pop culture blogging (which as an online activity seems to attract much more traffic). spidermite 12:42, 6 June 2006 (PDT)

That's interesting - I had assumed that inclusion of significant amounts of pop culture material was a result of popular interest in those topics. Can you give an example of what you mean?

Basically, without some kind of moderation, the more popular a wiki topic is, the more likely its entry will be unreliable. It's not the popular interest, it's the well-described popular interest in undocumented codswallop, like unsupported gossip (especially unhelpful when inserted as fact into entries about widely known dead people... on the other hand, supported gossip is ok, even thrilling if put in context), pseudo-science presented as science (a documented entry on a pseudo-science will always be helpful, but misleading readers without scholarly peer review is another tale). Politics is the extreme example because its mostly codswallop to begin with :)

A specialized wiki like this would likely not have such severe issues, unless it was replete, for example, with people who truly believed as a matter of faith that a Star Trekian warp drive enabling faster-than-light travel were possible and already supported by "alternate" but "valid" science, when in truth there's no evidence so far that such a drive could ever be built on any macro scale. It's like, the slippery slope: Asserting open-mindedness about possibilities is one thing, that's what SF is all about, but asserting that a given possibility may be assumed as potential reality is way dodgy. For starters, there are ranges of liklihood to consider (which brings up the difference between "hard" science fiction and SciFi/Fantasy).

I mean, an encyclopedia, as a reference, has among its responsibilities the task of helping its readers learn about stuff so they can avoid making uninformed (dumb) choices. Lastly, popularity almost never correlates with replicable, refutable, documented observation. spidermite 15:12, 6 June 2006 (PDT)