Dear Mr. Noah:
I know your column was intended to be kind of cutesy
and self-promoting ("Hey, look everyone, I have a Wikipedia entry, for
now!"), but your effort to indict Wikipedia for having notability
standards is just lame.
- "Wikipedia commands what is, for all practical purposes, infinite space and infinite manpower." You do work for an online publication, right? Because I would expect this sort of thing from a total newbie. Wikipedia has editorial administration, oversight and management, because it does have standards for completeness and style, and there will always be disputes over editing. Someone needs to have final say. Adding untold millions of articles on any subject or person, no matter how minor, is guaranteed to break the system.
- "If Wikipedia publishes a bio of my cleaning lady, that won't make it any harder to field experts to write and edit Wikipedia's bio of Albert Einstein. So why not let her in?" The internet is wonderful, but it's not magic. A huge database is difficult to manage, and expensive to host. A database run amok with useless entries is the shortest distance to bankruptcy. And yes, Mr. Noah, it costs money to run a site like Wikipedia.
- "Another limit is accuracy. The bio's assertions about my cleaning lady would have to be independently verifiable from trustworthy sources made available to readers. Otherwise Wikipedia's vast army of volunteer fact-checkers would be unable to find out whether the bio was truthful." The vast army of volunteer fact-checkers also has to care enough about a topic to check it. Having a notability requirement helps to ensure this.
- "We know why other encyclopedias need to limit the topics they cover." Here's the basic problem: You don't understand why an encyclopedia is useful. You don't need to create an article when the information is readily available elsewhere. Googling your name tells one all they need to know about you because there isn't that much which needs explanation, unlike - for example, using "random article" - coronal loops.
- "We limit entry to the club not because we need to, but because we want to." This ending is just wacky. You're protesting being removed from Wikipedia, not because your cleaning lady never got an entry in the first place. You are pissed because you want to be in the club, not because entry is limited. And using an internet resource - especially one like Wikipedia - as an example of an exclusionary social structure is ludicrous. Google exists, okay? If you feel the need to be known, put up a vanity page. Get a free blog and autobio yourself until you can't autobio anymore.
Update: I had forgotten I had written this about Noah three years ago. He makes as little sense now as he did then.
Comments