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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2022 3:53 am
by oranges33
[[Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.]]

Wikipedia found it encyclopedic to completely reframe Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 50 year career and celebrity in the lede based off tweets about... 3 years of a pandemic. The entire first sentence was made to fit the last 3 years, and half the lede is now about the last 3 years.

2019 article (pre-COVID)
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =905470045
"Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (born January 17, 1954) is an American activist, environmental attorney, and author. Kennedy serves as president of the board of Waterkeeper Alliance,[1] a non-profit environmental group that he helped found in 1999."

current article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr.
"Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (born January 17, 1954) is an American environmental lawyer and author known for promoting anti-vaccine propaganda and conspiracy theories."

former article mentions vaccines 0 times
current article mentions 'vaccines'... 92 times

Thought Wikipedia was an encyclopedia, not a place to get wp:bludgeoned about whatever people don't like about what a person is doing at the moment

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2022 12:14 am
by Strelnikov
Emperor Tomato Ketchup (the film, not the Stereolab album)

A 1970 (Wikipedia says 1971) 27-minute monochrome short film by Japanese New Wave director Shūji Terayama that was expanded into a 75-minute feature film in 1996*, Tomato Kechappu Kōtei is an experimental film about a Japan of the then-near future where the children have taken over, formed an empire, and their child army arrests, enslaves, tortures, kills adults. All of the child roles are played by children, which gets touchy because the film pantomimes them sexually assaulting adults at points. Terayama is mocking, in a very shocking way, how Japan acted in WWII and also how Japan was treated by the US afterwards, like they were children; in the new Japanese child empire, the national dish is that condiment from America, tomato ketchup. It's also a mockery of the cult of the Emperor, and the title as an institution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_T ... hup_(film)

The Wikipedia article is little more than a stub and claims "The film is banned in many countries, considered child pornography" when their only evidence for that is a link to a 2015 Canadian trial in Ontario where the film was used as evidence against Brian Way, who had run a firm selling "nudist films" of boys on DVD; at one point he had sold Emperor Tomato Ketchup in some form. Which is impressive because I've never heard of an English-subtitled version of the film in either version; the Internet Archive has both versions of the film and there are German titles but no subtitles for the Japanese dialogue or the found audio that runs through the film. Way was using the child nudity of the film as its selling point, when that was the element designed to shock Japanese audiences.

A 2009 essay in Afterall magazine on the film: https://www.afterall.org/article/the.im ... to.ketchup

* Wikipedia does not list who edited that version, because Terayama had died in 1983.

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2022 5:02 am
by ericbarbour
Wikipedia is no different than IMDB when it comes to obscure underground films. "Lip service" is paid, but the fanatical detail that Hollywood blockbusters get (including lengthy plot summaries) doesn't extend to anti-blockbusters. In that way Wikipedia is not a "revolutionary" or even an "accurate" reference.

Many of the directors listed in the underground film article get long bios--but most of their films get little or nothing, especially the short subjects. Lotsa red links/no links in many articles.

They love the hell outta Ken Anger, but even he doesn't get separate articles for every title.

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2022 1:05 pm
by Strelnikov
ericbarbour wrote:
Wed Jul 27, 2022 5:02 am
Wikipedia is no different than IMDB when it comes to obscure underground films. "Lip service" is paid, but the fanatical detail that Hollywood blockbusters get (including lengthy plot summaries) doesn't extend to anti-blockbusters. In that way Wikipedia is not a "revolutionary" or even an "accurate" reference.

Many of the directors listed in the underground film article get long bios--but most of their films get little or nothing, especially the short subjects. Lotsa red links/no links in many articles.

They love the hell outta Ken Anger, but even he doesn't get separate articles for every title.
Well there are issues with lost underground films, also many films are experimental mood pieces so you really can't recount a coherent plot. Where IMDb excels over Wikipedia is that the directors can put in their own films if they can prove stuff; Wikipedia is crippled by its Secondary Sources rule. Kenneth Anger is well covered because he gave out a lot of interviews and kept notes. As a counter example, we know very little about A.J. Rose, Jr.'s completely silent monochrome short Penis (1965), except that it was trimmed from 20 minutes down to *something* and retitled 1967 for showings in arthouses. The original was declared lost but then recovered in 2021. You can see it on YouTube because it won't link here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0TOanLkd9I ).
Time Piece, a 1965 color short by Jim Henson. No puppets at all in the film:



Related but not: Wikipedia has an article on what used to be Mondo Mini Shows, now called Mondo Media (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondo_Media ) There is no mention of a lesser Flash-animated show they did around 2001, Absolute Zero, which was a parody of music interview shows, and each episode ran for 3-4 minutes. Hell if you look on IMDb, it isn't there either.....I looked up the people I thought were the voice actors and they did not have the show listed at all in their filmographies. Totally buried.




"Vita" the Icelandic girl was voiced by Lorri Holt, Calum Grant voiced "Ozzie/Ozzy" the Puffin. "Thom York" was voiced by Amir Talai; "Madonna" was voiced by Alexis Lezin. I have no idea why it's not on IMDb when a fellow obscure MMS cartoon, The God & Devil Show, is listed there (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17730778/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2 ). We know nothing about release dates, number of episodes made, etc.

*****

After doing some thinking, there is the possibility that certain actors in Penis were not told that they were acting in a symbolic film about homosexuality and transgenderism, which means this might have been like Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) except nobody was told what the director was actually doing and there was no second secret film crew. There is no cast list, no listed crew, no director name in the film itself (probably on the film canister.)

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2022 7:52 pm
by ericbarbour
Strelnikov wrote:
Wed Jul 27, 2022 1:05 pm
As a counter example, we know very little about A.J. Rose, Jr.'s completely silent monochrome short Penis (1965), except that it was trimmed from 20 minutes down to *something* and retitled 1967 for showings in arthouses. The original was declared lost but then recovered in 2021.
And Wikipedia gives it loving attention, because
The narrative is open to many interpretations, with people seeing stories of homosexuality and coming out,[2] critique of Vietnam War and/or American military,[2] and transgender (both transmasculine and transfeminine)[3] readings. It is theorized that Penis may be one of the first gay films.[4]
It's a very vague short yet LGBTQ people feel compelled to force their own interpretation--and post it on Wikipedia as "truth". Reddit and forum threads are used as "references".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_(film)
It was entirely written by someone who is evidently gay, Polish, and a big fan of gay manga/anime. How predictable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kamilla%C5%9A
Time Piece, a 1965 color short by Jim Henson. No puppets at all in the film:
BUT OMG THAT'S JIM HENSON OMGOMG
Plus it did win some film festival awards.
Related but not: Wikipedia has an article on what used to be Mondo Mini Shows, now called Mondo Media (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondo_Media ) There is no mention of a lesser Flash-animated show they did around 2001, Absolute Zero, which was a parody of music interview shows, and each episode ran for 3-4 minutes.
That is EXTREMELY obscure. Mondo cranked out a lot of crap in 30 years so I'm not surprised some of their titles are not listed on WP or IMDB. I recall they posted many of their cartoons on Newgrounds, because before 2005, where else can you post short cartoons online? Things like YouTube or Vimeo came a lot later. Using Newgrounds to post your original content was "declassé" because "it's for amateurs and kiddies" or something. Happy Tree Friends got a lot of its early interest thanks to Newgrounds.

Another early web-cartoon factory that gets no love from Wikipedia: Camp Chaos. They were notorious for the "Napster Bad" video and for being threatened by Nickelodeon for making "Spongebong Hemppants". The only real mention of Camp Chaos on Wikipedia is one paragraph buried in Bob Cesca, and VH1 Ill-ustrated. VH1 was owned by Viacom along with Nickelodeon. Apparently the Camp Chaos show was canceled because of Spongebong. Ironic that.

Why is there no Camp Chaos article? Are Wiki-Fucks offended because Cesca made fun of Metallica 20 years ago?

Camp Chaos dates back to the paleolithic era of the public internet. The oldest capture on Wayback is from December 1998. It lists cartoons and gags that you cannot find ANYWHERE online today. Campchaos.com was finally pulled down in 2010 and forwarded to Snark Rocket, which is nothing but an email address.

Camp Chaos made many things other than the cartoons for VH1. Dozens of Flash cartoons. Most totally forgotten. I suppose Nipple Man doesn't exist. Neither does Popeye Vs. Anime. There's even an IMDB listing, albeit incomplete. But Wikipedia has no idea.

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 7:05 am
by Strelnikov
The narrative is open to many interpretations, with people seeing stories of homosexuality and coming out,[2] critique of Vietnam War and/or American military,[2] and transgender (both transmasculine and transfeminine)[3] readings. It is theorized that Penis may be one of the first gay films.[4]

It's a very vague short yet LGBTQ people feel compelled to force their own interpretation--and post it on Wikipedia as "truth". Reddit and forum threads are used as "references".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_(film)

It was entirely written by someone who is evidently gay, Polish, and a big fan of gay manga/anime. How predictable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kamilla%C5%9A
You see this a lot in academic studies of gay culture, making educated guesses about early bits of media. They think Penis is gay because of all the dicks in it, but one character rubs his face on a woman's large breasts (that's where the trans readings come from.) We don't have the director to talk to, and he might say (as many directors do) "let the film speak for itself", and because it's pure cinema with no sound what we think we get out of the film is what it means. It is possible to create meaning out of found items if you edit them together properly: Arthur Lipsett's 1963 monochrome short 21-87 uses collage of Montreal and New York City street scenes, found footage, and snippets of people talking. I only know about it because there is a conversation at 3:35 where an uncredited Roman Kroitor* talks about "a force in nature" connecting people and living things, and George Lucas got his idea of "the Force" for Star Wars. The found footage includes Mercury capsule cabin video of an astronaut I can't identify, a guy on fire, and violence at the 1939 German American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden where a Jewish teen rushed the stage and was beaten up (I've seen that footage before.) Vimeo has the best quality version of the short: https://vimeo.com/29432400
That is EXTREMELY obscure. Mondo cranked out a lot of crap in 30 years so I'm not surprised some of their titles are not listed on WP or IMDB. I recall they posted many of their cartoons on Newgrounds, because before 2005, where else can you post short cartoons online? Things like YouTube or Vimeo came a lot later. Using Newgrounds to post your original content was "declassé" because "it's for amateurs and kiddies" or something. Happy Tree Friends got a lot of its early interest thanks to Newgrounds.

Another early web-cartoon factory that gets no love from Wikipedia: Camp Chaos. They were notorious for the "Napster Bad" video and for being threatened by Nickelodeon for making "Spongebong Hemppants". The only real mention of Camp Chaos on Wikipedia is one paragraph buried in Bob Cesca, and VH1 Ill-ustrated. VH1 was owned by Viacom along with Nickelodeon. Apparently the Camp Chaos show was canceled because of Spongebong. Ironic that.

Why is there no Camp Chaos article? Are Wiki-Fucks offended because Cesca made fun of Metallica 20 years ago?
I think it's because they are lazy. I first saw Absolute Zero on Mondo's own site, not on Newgrounds; I remember finding it after Dan Perkins ("Tom Tomorrow") did an animated cartoon of his This Modern World newspaper strip and he had the URL on his site. Wikipedia has all sorts of gaps when it comes to non-commercial animation; take No-Neck Joe for example. Craig McCracken (The Powerpuff Girls, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Wander over Yonder) did these shorts with the Spike and Mike organization. The idiots at Wikipedia think there was one No-Neck Joe cartoon in the BLP of the man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_McCracken Here is proof that they are dead wrong, behold:



McCracken did a couple of "dark" No-Neck Joe cartoons for Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation: they take up the first six minutes of this VHS dub of the cartoon compilations that the organization would put out for sale. Right after that blob of cartoons is Beyond Grandpa an early cartoon from Breehn John Burns, who later gave us the Dr. Tran (2003-09) series and the more recent Bravest Warriors (2012-18). That tape must date to 1999 or 2000, because the then-newest cartoon dates to 1999. There were two separate animation festivals that the Spike and Mike people did, the "normal" one and the "sick" one, and the level of "sick" varied from year to year. Streaming killed off the festival, they tried to come back in 2015 or so as just a "sick" festival but I haven't heard from them since. In the glory years, they would run it at the MCASD** La Jolla auditorium and down at the Ken Cinema.



It turns out there were TEN shorts made from 1990 to 1998: https://lostmediaarchive.fandom.com/wik ... rt_series)

So yeah, it's just dead laziness, plus they don't allow experts in anything, or have the willingness to check all these new sources online.

________

* Canadian filmmaker/inventor, made films for the National Film Board, liked doing cinéma vérité in these NFB documentaries (his 1962 Paul Anka doc Lonely Boy inspired how D.A. Pennebaker shot the 1965 Bob Dylan tour of Britain that became Don't Look Back,1967.) He was a co-founder of the IMAX format, invented the SANDDE ("Stereoscopic ANimation Drawing DEvice") system for doing 3D animation in IMAX in the mid-1990s.

** Museum of Contemorary Art of San Diego. One branch downtown. The place in La Jolla is the original.

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 4:25 pm
by Dr Mario
ericbarbour wrote:
Wed Jul 27, 2022 5:02 am
Wikipedia is no different than IMDB when it comes to obscure underground films. "Lip service" is paid, but the fanatical detail that Hollywood blockbusters get (including lengthy plot summaries) doesn't extend to anti-blockbusters. In that way Wikipedia is not a "revolutionary" or even an "accurate" reference.

Many of the directors listed in the underground film article get long bios--but most of their films get little or nothing, especially the short subjects. Lotsa red links/no links in many articles.

They love the hell outta Ken Anger, but even he doesn't get separate articles for every title.
IMDB and Wikipedia are both terrible source once you start digging for all the obscure stuff that isn't exactly main stream. This just an example when a primary source (i.e the films them self) trumps any secondary source.

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2022 2:08 am
by ericbarbour
As long as you mentioned it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_ ... _of_Canada
In total, the NFB has produced over 13,000 productions since its inception
And how many of those 13,000 productions have Wikipedia listings? I figure about 400 (there is a lot of repetition in these subcategories):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category: ... nada_films

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 6:13 pm
by ericbarbour
GO AHEAD, ASK A WIKIPEDIA CULT MEMBER:

WHY IS FRANK AMODEO SUCH A CRAP ARTICLE?

Not as if there wasn't massive media coverage of his story.....but instead of running that, they give a link to his stupid vanity site.

There's a book!

Count Dankula (yeah, HIM) did a long video about Amodeo. When a Count Dankula video is a better reference work than Wikipedia, THERE'S A GODDAMN PROBLEM, OKAY??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ1camSU6Jw

Re: Crap or questionable articles

Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2022 5:13 am
by ericbarbour
not my "get", but worth reposting:
From an article on whistlers:

"Whistlers were named by British World War I radio operators. On the wide-band spectrogram, the observed characteristic of a whistler is that the tone rapidly descends over a few seconds—almost like a person whistling or an incoming grenade—hence the name "whistlers.""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistler_(radio)

Yes, those grenades being hand tossed into enemy trenches in WWI whistled just like the incoming shells.