Wikipedia Sucks!

New post on the "case in point" issue of the 1951 Hoffmann Wikipedia article, where there wasn't an article on a unique homebuilt car built in Occupied West Germany until Jalopnik's Jason Torchinsky drove the museum-kept vehicle for a YouTube video three years ago....pictures and a simple writeup existed of the vehicle back in 2003, but it wasn't interesting enough for Wikipedia, and the article on the Hoffmann is still a stub.

Seems to be just a standard example of Wikipedia's crapness, particularly for nichery, and their model has never been anything but following not leading. They're just not very good at it. Undoubtedly they are getting worse, but they were hardly tearing up trees even in their heyday.

The real question here, seems to be that posed on the talk page.......

What is the connection to Hoffmann motorcycles?
I found the following article: https://www.hagerty.com/articles-videos ... -an-empire

It implies there is a connection between Hoffmann motorcycles and the 1951 Hoffmann car, however the name associated with the car is Michael Hoffmann, and the name associated with the motorcycles is Jakob Oswald Hoffmann. If someone can find a source to reconcile these two names, that would be great. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Qoncept (talk • contribs) 22:43, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Nobody answered. On Wikipedia, nobody ever answers........it's where knowledge goes to die.

The answer will be in a book somewhere. Probably written by a renowned automotive historian, whose standard of living suddenly declined around 2007.......

CrowsNest wrote:Seems to be just a standard example of Wikipedia's crapness, particularly for nichery, and their model has never been anything but following not leading. They're just not very good at it. Undoubtedly they are getting worse, but they were hardly tearing up trees even in their heyday.

The real question here, seems to be that posed on the talk page.......

What is the connection to Hoffmann motorcycles?
I found the following article: https://www.hagerty.com/articles-videos ... -an-empire

It implies there is a connection between Hoffmann motorcycles and the 1951 Hoffmann car, however the name associated with the car is Michael Hoffmann, and the name associated with the motorcycles is . If someone can find a source to reconcile these two names, that would be great. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Qoncept (talk • contribs) 22:43, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Nobody answered. On Wikipedia, nobody ever answers........it's where knowledge goes to die.

The answer will be in a book somewhere. Probably written by a renowned automotive historian, whose standard of living suddenly declined around 2007.......

My answer to the question is "scrapers, and confused names"....the Hagerty writer thought Michael Hoffmann was Jakob Oswald Hoffman and that the 1951 car was the Isetta knockoff Hoffmann built in 1954-55, when it clearly isn't. Also J.O. Hoffman was a builder of Vespa scooters and pedal bikes before that, so all the weird design issues of the 1951 Hoffmann would not be a thing to somebody with a vehicle design background*. Where did these people scrape their data from? A page I quietly linked to in the post, from the now-defunct Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum (1996-2013), which only lists the builder as "M. Hoffmann" which you might be able to misread as "Mr. Hoffmann" and then you go looking on Wikipedia and you find the page on "Hoffmann (motorcycle)" which predates the one on "Hoffmann (automobile)" by six years and somehow Hoffmann the tinkerer becomes Hoffmann the small industrialist.

Isetta:

Hoffmann:

And now you know why I am wary of 'bots writing encyclopedias, especially if they are overseen by lazy people.
_______

* That written, Jakob Hoffmann built his Isetta clone "Auto-Kabine 250" with side doors instead of a nose door, which Iso had put in the Isetta so that city drivers (and most of the bubble cars were for city dwellers) could back into "impossible" parking spots and the driver and passenger could climb out of the car. In order for BMW to get the Isetta to mid-'50s West Germany they had to legally kill Hoffmann's car, which was easy because he didn't have any approval from Iso to build a car that was 80 percent their design. [edit: The "luxury" version of the Auto-Kabine 250 would have two doors, while the standard one only a single door on the right (passenger) side. The "250" was for the cubic centimeters, which was a lie; the car actually had a 300cc motor, breaking the microcar licensing regulations, which could be little to none depending on engine size.]

FWIW this is generally true of Wikipedia's automotive coverage. Internet nerds don't seem to give much of a damn about cars and don't ask me why. Cars are FAR more important to the lives of average people than, say, the Avro Lancaster. A WWII bomber with a MASSIVE and hyper-detailed wiki article. Thanks partly to maniacs like Kyteto.

Typical--they love military historical trivia. And cartoons and Doctor Who.....it's still a "nerdipedia" first and foremost.

Also: Compare the article about the Ford F-series pickup trucks, among the most popular vehicles ever made, with (probably, Wikipedia won't tell you) more than a hundred million units made to date.

PS the Isetta article is unintentionally hilarious:

In the event of a crash, the driver and passenger were to exit through the canvas sunroof.

In the event of a crash in this thing, the driver and passenger were probably doomed.....

A robot would never mistake the Hoffmans if it was compiling an encyclopedia solely from sources which have been human verified to be reliable and authoritative.

If they are different, then the similarities that do exist surely demands one of those italic qualifiers at the top of the article. Its absence is yet more proof the article has never felt the deft touch of that very rare thing, an expert in both the subject matter and Wikipedia. This is the resource gap that will kill them, is going to kill them, especially if the Wikipedia experts keep up their campaign of hostility and arrogance toward the topic experts. Becoming an expert in Wikipedia is easy, a trivial task. Becoming an expert in microcars.....not so much. Would Bruce Weiner ever survive the Wikipedia initiation rituals? Would be ever even be interested in editing?

I wouldn't say the size of the Avro Lancaster page is down to nerditry per se, not expert driven anyway. If Wikipedia was awash with military aviation nerds, then there wouldn't be such a gaping chasm in depth of coverage between that and the Avro Vulcan, which followed just a few years later, but was both ground breaking and arguably just as influential in defence of the realm. A full on nerd could write a million words on both, all impeccably sourced.

No, it seems to me the difference is caused by populism, which in turn drives obsessives. The Lancaster page has suffered from the attentions of those who can't tell where the line is between an encyclopedia and a book, and will dump the entire contents of the latter into Wikipedia (not from a book of course, but online sources). You will actually more often see MilHist members trying to keep them out (although they too trend to the over-detailed, as true topic nerds). By contrast, the Vulcan page has suffered due to the lack of attention from anyone who has ever read a book. It still gets populist edits, just not to the level of detail of the Lancaster.

I think this also adequately explains the difference between the articles for stuff like the E-series, and less well known stuff like the Hoffman (M). Even the other Hoffman page looks sparse and unloved, given what must be out there in terms of sourcing.

Eric Corbett is a bit of an automotive nerd, and thus is quietly trying to improve Wikipedia's car articles. Although obviously due to his, um, difficulties, he does it alone, undisturbed by any of the typical forces that would help raise the bar of quality through collaborative editing (enforced through warnings and blocks from his admin protectors if need be). Even worse, they get superficial reviews by adoring fans who know less than shit about the subject, so that gives them a badge of quality they are unlikely to merit. All simply because Eric can properly layout/format a Wikipedia article (to his own unique style of course), cites his sources (ditto), and resists the urge to go full nerd.

Ironic post of the day......

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... _to_oppose

The price of opposing an Eric Corbett FAC, especially for a trivial reason like the quality of prose, is typically death.

I'd be interested to see what Eric could do with the Hoffman (M) page, if only to keep him away from more heavily trafficked articles. Protect the innocent, and all that.

ericbarbour wrote:FWIW this is generally true of Wikipedia's automotive coverage. Internet nerds don't seem to give much of a damn about cars and don't ask me why. Cars are FAR more important to the lives of average people than, say, the Avro Lancaster. A WWII bomber with a MASSIVE and hyper-detailed wiki article. Thanks partly to maniacs like Kyteto.

Typical--they love military historical trivia. And cartoons and Doctor Who.....it's still a "nerdipedia" first and foremost.

Also: Compare the article about the Ford F-series pickup trucks, among the most popular vehicles ever made, with (probably, Wikipedia won't tell you) more than a hundred million units made to date.

PS the Isetta article is unintentionally hilarious:

In the event of a crash, the driver and passenger were to exit through the canvas sunroof.

In the event of a crash in this thing, the driver and passenger were probably doomed.....

It's because the Avro Lancaster was in The Dam Busters (1955), a slightly-mythic recreation of Operation Chastise, the "bouncing bomb" attack on three German dams in 1943....and bits of that movie plus 633 Squadron (1964) were the "visual basis" for the trench-run attack at the end of Star Wars (1977). Also, there is the element of plastic model making from kits, and WWII airplanes look good in small scale (camouflage paintjobs, etc.)

Internet nerds don't seem to give much of a damn about cars and don't ask me why.

Cars are a "jock" thing to them, many of them live in states or towns with decent public transport, and if they don't, cars are too boring to talk about. If they won't write about the F-series trucks, then they do a shallow job writing about the Crown Victoria Police Interceptors, no mention of the specialized wiring jobs done on many so that power outlet connectors for police gear could be hidden under rocker panels, nor a mention of the special dash trunk button by the heater control, nor that most of the cars were built body on chassis and not Unibody, nor that both the V8 motor and the automatic transmission had been built by Ford since the 1960s, nor that the cars were often sold to the FCC as pirate radio hunters with specialized direction-finding antennas inside the roof. Yes, the GAI in Russia used Crown Vics in the 1990s to nail speeders, but if you look online, you will find that the Moscow branch was getting foreign cars to ticket speeders as far back as the 1960s, mostly BMWs, in very small numbers.

In the event of a crash in this thing, the driver and passenger were probably doomed.....
Isettas were not built for American open roads even back in the 1960s; they were cars for the postwar Italian city and thus were up against Vespa scooters, bikes, buses, the occasional Mercedes-Benz 180. There were nutballs who would drive them on long trips, probably in the far right lane, but once better small cars emerged (or the used VW Beetle market got cheap enough) the Isetta was ditched.

Try to unpack the historical basis for the 1969 film Mosquito Squadron, starring David McCallum (Man from UNCLE). Gave me a proper headache, multiple separate missions/weapons/operations seem to the loose basis for what was essentially just a corny (and nowadays undoubtedly sexist) film about sex and death, lazily exploiting the war as a convenient backdrop. This technique was obviously used with more success in Affleck's Pearl Harbour.

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia is no help, what is there merely adds to the confusion for the average reader, rather than educating. The film article hasn't ballooned into a huge volume for the reasons I gave above - it wasn't a pop culture hit, so it isn't as attractive to the sort of nerds Wikipedia attracts.

A proper rivet counting obsessive could write a ton of material about that movie, they just haven't bothered, because they're busy in the sort of places where I did eventually get a good picture of what was fact and the what was fiction. Obviously most of that material would be inadmissible per WP:OR, but there's no sign in its short history that has happened here.

Proving my theory, the film 633 Squadron, which has a similar issue of not having a single mission as a hook, is in contrast to Mosquito Squadron, packed with obsessive detail, even having its own Historical Accuracy section. The reason for this difference can only be because 633 Squadron was a hit with the public, and has endured into popular culture.

Pop culture is what Wikipedians, even most of their obsessive elements, use as their source material. Neither historians nor rivet counters form a significant proportion of Wikipedia's editor base. Obviously in theory, if one is captured by the cult, they could as a single individual make a significant impact in a very small area, such as a single aircraft type. But it is precisely Wikipedia's nature that typically ensures that doesn't happen - there's just nothing in it for them.

....If they are different, then the similarities that do exist surely demands one of those italic qualifiers at the top of the article. Its absence is yet more proof the article has never felt the deft touch of that very rare thing, an expert in both the subject matter and Wikipedia. This is the resource gap that will kill them, is going to kill them, especially if the Wikipedia experts keep up their campaign of hostility and arrogance toward the topic experts. Becoming an expert in Wikipedia is easy, a trivial task. Becoming an expert in microcars.....not so much. Would Bruce Weiner ever survive the Wikipedia initiation rituals? Would be ever even be interested in editing?

I wouldn't say the size of the Avro Lancaster page is down to nerditry per se, not expert driven anyway. If Wikipedia was awash with military aviation nerds, then there wouldn't be such a gaping chasm in depth of coverage between that and the Avro Vulcan, which followed just a few years later, but was both ground breaking and arguably just as influential in defence of the realm. A full on nerd could write a million words on both, all impeccably sourced.

No, it seems to me the difference is caused by populism, which in turn drives obsessives. The Lancaster page has suffered from the attentions of those who can't tell where the line is between an encyclopedia and a book, and will dump the entire contents of the latter into Wikipedia (not from a book of course, but online sources). You will actually more often see MilHist members trying to keep them out (although they too trend to the over-detailed, as true topic nerds). By contrast, the Vulcan page has suffered due to the lack of attention from anyone who has ever read a book. It still gets populist edits, just not to the level of detail of the Lancaster.

Bruce Weiner auctioned his museum off, kept the website going as a simple reference. I don't think he wants to tango with Wales' New Bedlam.

The difference between the Lancaster bomber and the Vulcan was that the former dropped conventional bombs in "The War to End Fascism" and the latter was a futuristic jet delta nuclear bomber for whom a successful bombing mission meant the end of the world (yes, the Vulcans flew conventional bombing raids on the Falkland Islands in 1982, mirroring how USAF B-52 nuclear bombers were used in the Vietnam War; it's hard to hurrah the Cold War bombers.) This is why you don't hear a lot of happy talk about the Republic F-105 Thunderchief, a massive jet fighter-bomber designed to drop a single nuclear bomb on Soviet surface-to-air missile launchers or any missile silo on the fringes of the Soviet borders (USAF Tactical Air Command would get "first strike" capability with this aircraft.) Instead they were used up over Vietnam, carrying a conventional bomb load larger than a B-17's (6000 pounds versus the 4000 the WWII plane regularly carried); 800 airplanes were built in the late 1950s, by 1971 nearly 400 had been shot down and the rest were converted into trainers or "Wild Weasel" SAM hunters. TAC was forced to use the F-4 Phantom II (a Navy fighter-bomber) because McDonnell-Douglas was still building them, and the F-111 fighter bomber that was supposed to replace the F-105 was not ready by the late 1960s. If you didn't live through any part of the Cold War, the whole thing is a slog.

I don't want to be mean, but is the absence of an article on a one-off hobbyist car anywhere near the first page of the List Of Things That Are Wrong With Wikipedia?

AndrewForson wrote:I don't want to be mean, but is the absence of an article on a one-off hobbyist car anywhere near the first page of the List Of Things That Are Wrong With Wikipedia?

In a normal encyclopedia, no. Wikipedia, however, has this on-again off-again belief that it is the Ultimate Encyclopedia, and so that blog post is cutting that grandiose idea down to size, because if they were the Greatest Source of Research Knowledge, there would at least have been a stub on the Hoffmann long before Jason Torchinsky drove the car in 2015. They also have no excuse if they were to respond with "there was nothing online"; the Bruce Weiner museum has a page dating back to the early 2000s on the Hoffmann.

Also, we know next-to-nothing about Michael Hoffmann, so we have no idea if this was a "hobbyist car" as you put it, or a prototype for a car he was trying to sell to a West German motorcycle and micro car manufacturer willing to start production, or if he was going to go kit car with it like the American King Midget was early on.....and the whole thing was killed due to the horrendous road handling qualities of his car. The car itself is built in such a way that it is hard to tell where many of the parts came from; Torchinsky thought the front axle was sourced from a junked VW Kübelwagen military jeep (Hoffmann using only one of the torsion bars as an axle shaft.) Where did the sequential gearbox come from? How did Hoffmann source the aluminum? It is a car of mysteries.