Wikipedia Loves Guns

[CrowsNest]

It continues to amaze me how anyone ever accepts, even with caveats, that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Nothing illustrates its non-encyclopedic nature better than the total mess their articles on guns represent. It is an amazing quagmire of duplication and Amero-centricness, and the stench of low quality work is overpowering. So much so that you reality have to wonder if the Wikipediots have ever really appreciated that their nominal purpose in life is helping readers access information.

There are no less than four main articles just for "Gun XX in the United States" - law, politics, culture and violence. Considering the huge amount of duplication between them, they could quite easily be reduced to just two, one for the legal aspects, the other for the cultural.

Presumably because there are so many main articles and they are so huge, you don't have to wander very far into the weeds to find gun related articles where the quality is beyond shit. Clearly editors interested in gun articles rarely get the chance to tend to these parts of the encyclopedia. It's hard to say whether articles like "Public opinion on gun control in the United States" were created for size reasons or as POV forks, but the end result is inarguably shit. That, and many other articles at the edges, could quite easily be merged without any loss of encyclopedic detail.

And while it is obvious that the level of interest in guns, certainly in the USA, does warrant the presence of numerous well chosen child articles on certain topics, so as not to overwhelm the main USA articles, it is clear from examples like "Concealed carry in the United States" that little to no effort is being made to ensure these articles remain high quality works of summary - there is a preponderance of primary sourcing, and a bunch of secondary sources which are obviously of an advocacy nature.

This dearth of editor effort at the edges shouldn't persuade anyone that this at least might mean the top level USA articles are any better for it. You can tell quite easily from those articles that there's no real guiding hand at work (if it wasn't merely obvious from the level of duplication), nor is there really a tightly focused group of collaborators who work together to ensure they use the highest quality sources, or try to present a cohesive narrative.

News sources of course feature heavily even in these overview articles, and that is the case even for citing historical things like the circumstances of the passage of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, sourced to a 2013 USA Today story rushed out in the wake of another mass shooting, rather than a more academic and reflective work. It is a myth at the best of times, but these articles really do show the Wikipedia model of combining one time and continuing contributions to make a cohesive whole, is a sham.

Going up the ladder to the top level global perspective articles about guns, huge problems also exist, and this is quite simply due to the massive problem of Wikipedia being totally dominated by editors from the USA. Articles like "Gun ownership" might as well be renamed "Gun ownership in the United States", given it lacks any information at all about the rest of the world. The "Studies" section of the "Gun control" top level article is exclusively about the USA, to the point they even lazily refer to the "National Research Council".

The preponderance of a whole sub-level of articles exclusively for the USA has bizarrely seemingly left quite important top level articles like "Gun violence" to just rot - if the maintenance tags are to be believed, it has neither been updated, not cured of its American focus, since 2014. In had to test it to be sure, and yes, unbelievably, "Gun reform" actually takes you to the USA article on gun politics.

It would be too unfair to say Wikipedia doesn't at least sometimes recognise there are 197 other countries in the world, but encyclopedic treatment of guns in their context is all too often presented as a mere comparison to the United States, which is more often than not just a very large section in a list of country specific sub-sections.

Overall, readers are clearly not going to find anything of use in this infuriating rabbit warren, and would be better served simply typing a few key phrases into Google. I would so dearly love to see some hard data on that score, but of course Wikipedia dropped its trial of a user feedback tool years ago. Not because it didn't benefit readers, but because it was making editors sad/mad. You can see why.

[The End]

Jimbo Wales' first edit was on guns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =337165067

His earliest edits focused on guns.

[ericbarbour]

fwiw this is considered a part of their "Military History" area, so no one is permitted to post "bad information" about firearms. It's a hobbyist area and nuts make all kinds of custom weapons and ammo formats ("950 JDJ" anyone?), most of which do NOT pass their own notability requirements. But the rules are different for Military History related topics....

Also, Jimbo has a personal blog (jimmywales.com, not updated since 2012). He spent a LOT of time back in 2001 posting items about guns. Then he removed everything prior to October 2004. You will need archive.org to see the older stuff:
https://web.archive.org/web/20020901000 ... ywales.com

Back when he was still being allowed to edit his own bio:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... id=5769956

* While it is sort of ok to call me a "firearms enthusiast" it is more accurate to say that I take a strong interest in firearms policy and legal issues, especially constitutional issues. I own guns, but I hardly ever go shooting, and I have never in my life gone hunting. It's really more of an intellectual hobby than a practical hobby.

[CrowsNest]

The high level pages have plenty of bad information. It's just terribly written, presented and organised. Some of that is due to how crap Wikipedia is, but some will be due to them trying to desperately hammer the point home. Wikipedians have always had a hard time understanding that sometimes less is more. It's why their Trump bashing extends to a bazillion gigabytes.