A Stars Hollow Gazette
A lot of people (including Stephen Colbert) are down on Wikipedia because it is edited by just anyone.
First of all this is not exactly true and with just a little bit of surfing ability (which I’d tell you all about in excruciating detail except I already have 17 lives) you can find all the fights just as surely as you can in orange.
Oh you mandarins get that, I know you do.
And that’s exactly the point. When you cite Wikipedia you are citing the common wisdom, the battleground, the future history.
The contested record.
So if your facts contradict Wikipedia you’d maybe like to cite an alternate source.
What I don’t like about Wikipedia is they’re making all the articles shorter which makes narrative harder to put together and some parts much weaker than others. When I was sketching out my history of the Revolutionary War I found pivotal events that had been a minor part of a collective battle or campaign in context either minimized to an unquotable obscurity or expanded into a tome of self indulgence (a very powerful magic item indeed).
I mention this in the context of some long term research I’ll be sharing into Martin Luther King Jr. and his teachings about activism, and Keynesian Economics. If I tend to quote the most simplistic summaries it’s simply because they are common and accepted.
Wikipedia has sadly fallen down in the area of pop culture, partially due to copyright cops deleting many quotes and redacting plot summaries and story arcs. As ever anything you read about a celebrity is carefully vetted by their publicist and lawyer if they have any self respect at all. Even so I never find a paucity of undeniable facts to hate.
Ditto corporations and politicians, if you’re muckraking Wikipedia isn’t the place to start but it is a public record.
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If events allow.
Might make either a hip indy soap opera or something like this here… You have to be at least as fascinating as him, right?
…to find out about where to go to find the sources one needs. I have heard that it is approximately as accurate ad the Encyclopedia Britannica, with more about some subjects and less about others. Wiki’s blessing and curse is that it is updated faster and more often.
but not the be-all & end-all. That said, it’s been extremely helpful to me on occasion (and at least it notes when not all references have been properly sourced–love that!).
About shortening their articles: well, that’s not good, but then again few (dead-tree) encyclopedias give one the kind of cross-referencing that is common online.
So my guess is, it’s a wash: Wiki has a lot of advantages but should never be considered the final arbiter of any type of info. (Just a hunch.)