Crap or questionable articles

Good, bad, biased, paid or what-have-you. There's an endless supply.
User avatar
Strelnikov
Sucks Admin
Posts: 1041
Joined: Fri Feb 24, 2017 11:25 pm
Has thanked: 395 times
Been thanked: 251 times

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by Strelnikov » Sun Apr 16, 2017 10:44 am

ericbarbour wrote:A perfect, IDEAL example of Wikipedians acting like ADHD robot people. A long-and-still-growing article about a trivial news item.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Ex ... 1_incident

Created on 10 April. Three days later it was 49k bytes with 92 references.

And in six months it will probably be totally forgotten.


Sorry, that wasn't trivial; they beat the snot out of Dr. Dao to ferry a United employee in his place. The substandard, price-gouging service in air carriers seems to be reaching a breaking point, and this might be the start of it.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Apr 18, 2017 8:59 am

Strelnikov wrote:Sorry, that wasn't trivial; they beat the snot out of Dr. Dao to ferry a United employee in his place. The substandard, price-gouging service in air carriers seems to be reaching a breaking point, and this might be the start of it.

That would be expected and "reasonable", but you are forgetting the American corporate fondness for hiring special PR people to "make problems vanish". Plus, don't forget that Dao is Asian, meaning that White Asshole Middle America feels no sympathy for him (esp. in the Age of Donald); and United and the Daily Mail already tried to openly defame Dao. Remember this? The story is already dropping off Google News anyway. Dao will probably win in court; and the story will fade away.

Turning the American public against the airline industry will take a lot more atrocities. And most of all, rising prices. The main reason Joe Blow lets the airlines stomp on his face: airfares have actually declined in the past 40 years. A round-trip coach ticket from NY to LA costs about $1200-1500, when it should cost more like $5000 given the rate of inflation. Feel free to ask the good people at Flyer's Rights. They've been trying to fix the mess for 10+ years with little effect. (When they're not editing their own Wikipedia articles, of course.)

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Apr 18, 2017 9:07 am


Want proof that WP:REFERENCES is a load of bullshit? A stinking complicated multi-year lie? And that Wikipedia is misnamed and should be called Dork-o-Pedia?

Have this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_T ... characters

It has existed with no real references since 2006. It is now 176k bytes long. An attempt to AFD it last year failed.

User avatar
Strelnikov
Sucks Admin
Posts: 1041
Joined: Fri Feb 24, 2017 11:25 pm
Has thanked: 395 times
Been thanked: 251 times

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by Strelnikov » Tue Apr 18, 2017 6:51 pm

ericbarbour wrote:
Strelnikov wrote:Sorry, that wasn't trivial; they beat the snot out of Dr. Dao to ferry a United employee in his place. The substandard, price-gouging service in air carriers seems to be reaching a breaking point, and this might be the start of it.

That would be expected and "reasonable", but you are forgetting the American corporate fondness for hiring special PR people to "make problems vanish". Plus, don't forget that Dao is Asian, meaning that White Asshole Middle America feels no sympathy for him (esp. in the Age of Donald); and United and the Daily Mail already tried to openly defame Dao. Remember this? The story is already dropping off Google News anyway. Dao will probably win in court; and the story will fade away.

Turning the American public against the airline industry will take a lot more atrocities. And most of all, rising prices. The main reason Joe Blow lets the airlines stomp on his face: airfares have actually declined in the past 40 years. A round-trip coach ticket from NY to LA costs about $1200-1500, when it should cost more like $5000 given the rate of inflation. Feel free to ask the good people at Flyer's Rights. They've been trying to fix the mess for 10+ years with little effect. (When they're not editing their own Wikipedia articles, of course.)


Yes, I know they tried to defame him in the press, but I don't think that worked, and even if the story fades it joins the list of crappy actions by airlines that can be used in future news stories, as pamphlet material for Flyer's Rights, etc. The problem is not going away.

Don't blame Joe Blow, the airlines are a near-oligopoly, with four companies running 82% of the business; unless Joe Blow lives in a major American hub he has no choice of whom he he can buy a ticket from, as if that would matter because all the airlines suck the same way.....they have gone out of their way to not compete with each other. Re-regulation is a possible short-term solution because market forces create monopolies or semi-monopolies that allow crap service to be possible, though nationalizing air travel will probably be the only way out in the end.

___________________________

I looked at the Venture Brothers list of characters article; you are right, it's a joke. A lot of it reads like they adapted comments from the A.V. Club's episode reviews of the show, stuff from a VB Wikia, etc., but never named sources. Of course they would never throw it away, it's too large for that.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Sun Apr 30, 2017 2:19 am

Donald Trump is now 307 kbytes long and currently the longest biography on Wikipedia. Edited more than 22,000 times and still being fought over and trashed/untrashed. The history is now so long, it crashes the WikiHistory tool.

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Fri May 05, 2017 12:47 am

Two outstanding examples of badly sourced nerd blather

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coilgun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun

Compare those to any article about a controversial person or subject which attracts editwarring. Those articles end up with every damn sentence sourced to a "reliable second-party source" and sometimes with multiple sources. These articles are about technical devices; if anything on Wikipedia should have proper sourcing, it's stuff like this. But no one in Wiki-Fairy-Land gives a shit because it's not about their fave rock star or most-despised politician.

And I ran across another one that is just "???":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teltron_tube

This is on English Wikipedia; why is that important illustration in German? Because someone copied it from German Wikipedia in 2012, didn't bother to fix the diagram, and said "hopefully no typos". Thanks a lot, you anonymous sockpuppet who appears to belong to an HP employee!

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Sat May 13, 2017 10:35 pm

Really sad. Another leftover from Wikipedia's wholesale plundering of the 1911 Britannica. And only noticed because of the story of the "Swamp Ghost", which was VERY important to WP insiders because it was a piece of WWII history. They do military history real good maan; they do geography (and the history of obscure Papuan tribes who were wiped out by their neighbors or whatever) less well. Plus the latitude/longitude given are wrong (should be -9.1979,148.661733) and the references are shit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agaiambo

Note that you cannot search for Agaiambo on Google Earth or in many other online resources; the WP article, and all the stuff about the Swamp Ghost, represent the ONLY major online coverage of that place. Otherwise it doesn't exist.

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Mon May 15, 2017 11:44 pm

I've been watching Bruce Haack for years. Ludicrous fanboy monument for an obscure musician, almost no references. Just gets longer--not better.

Created in 2005, tagged since 2013--when it was chopped down because most of it was copied from a book. And then another anonymous IP address in Southern California started grinding it up again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bruc ... _violation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... 248.254.85

Most of it was generated by seemingly random IP addresses in Southern California. I suspect either nutcase fans, or else paid editing by someone in the entertainment business.

User avatar
tern
Sucks Noob
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu May 18, 2017 7:20 pm

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by tern » Thu May 18, 2017 9:18 pm

Member of the old site and of 'ocracy before that, first post here. Passionate to endorse the resistance to Wikipedia, but infrequent at posting, as I don't use the 'pedia, obviously, nor look at it much, and I have other busy interests.

But with the present British election on, I looked at the articles on British politics and political history, to see their balance or accuracy. Pleased to say that both are bad. Pleased to say they are unreliable erratic articles full of big gaps. if they represent the standard of articles generally, the represent that Wikipedia as a project has failed, in its claimed intention to be a reliable share source.

These articles leave out many prominent details, aspects of a situation, or links between events. Refer only fleetingly to some events, in absurdly dense detail to other events, erratically. Leave some events just stated arbitrarily without any analysis of their timings or causes.

User avatar
Flip Flopped
Sucks Warrior
Posts: 564
Joined: Sun Feb 26, 2017 3:38 am

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by Flip Flopped » Thu May 18, 2017 9:39 pm

tern wrote:Member of the old site and of 'ocracy before that, first post here. Passionate to endorse the resistance to Wikipedia, but infrequent at posting, as I don't use the 'pedia, obviously, nor look at it much, and I have other busy interests.

But with the present British election on, I looked at the articles on British politics and political history, to see their balance or accuracy. Pleased to say that both are bad. Pleased to say they are unreliable erratic articles full of big gaps. if they represent the standard of articles generally, the represent that Wikipedia as a project has failed, in its claimed intention to be a reliable share source.

These articles leave out many prominent details, aspects of a situation, or links between events. Refer only fleetingly to some events, in absurdly dense detail to other events, erratically. Leave some events just stated arbitrarily without any analysis of their timings or causes.
Thanks for posting, tern! This is a great post. We could use an entire thread on it.

Post Reply