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Wikipedia Is Not Amused By Entry For xkcd-Coined Word
ObsessiveMathsFreak writes "Today's xkcd comic introduced an unusual word — malamanteau — by giving its supposed definition on Wikipedia. The only trouble is that the word (as well as its supposed wiki page) did not in fact exist. Naturally, much ado ensued at the supposed wiki page, which was swiftly created in response to the comic. This article has more on how the comic and the confusion it caused have put the Net in a tizzy. It turns out that a malamanteau is a portmanteau of portmanteau and malapropism, but also a malapropism of portmanteau. All this puts Wikipedia in the confusing position of not allowing a page for an undefined word whose meaning is defined via the Wikipedia page for that word — and now I have to lie down for a moment."
This is the best example of why XKCD is an awesome web comic - a modern "funny" - I've seen in some time. In fact, I'd argue the societal commentary is often better - more cutting and intelligent - than you'll find most anywhere else (WSJ included). It's not always just "geeky" stuff, though Little Johny Normalization is a great example in that department, too.
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I'd check the quotation properly in my translation, but currently it's hiding somewhere in L-space, probably afraid to come out.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
read the talk page on wikipedia last night, might have been one of the funniest things i've ever read. i do love wikipedia admins, never before in human history has anyone gotten so drunk on so little power.
TL;DR
Personally I've been done with Wikipedia for years, it takes itself too seriously... A lot of what humanity was, is and will be is nothing more than bullshit and tom foolery. And unfortunately Wikipedia has only nailed the bullshit part thus far!
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This is what happens when you let a bunch of random self absorbed schmucks think what they are doing is actually important to the world.
While I'll use wikipedia as a starting reference point but lets face it, if you use Wikipedia as any sort of authoritative reference, you're an idiot. I say this because every person I know that uses wikipedia as a reference is in fact an idiot.
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The problem isn't really with xkcd. The problem is that there are tens of thousands of idiots out there who think they're as funny as xkcd. If the Wikipedia administrators only had to deal with the once-in-a-blue-moon comic vandalism by Randall Munroe or Stephen Colbert, this would be a non-issue. Unfortunately, when these idiots take it upon themselves to try to convince their buddies that they are as funny as the people who really are funny, it makes life awful difficult for people trying to maintain a useful site.
I'm GLAD they take themselves seriously. If we didn't have folks working on behalf of Wikipedia that did, looking up information on anything would be precisely as useful and informative as looking up information on malamanteau.
Wikipedia articles and wikipedia 'personalities' are two different things. You can use the articles while ignoring the personalities. Of course, if you want to edit the articles, you have to deal with the personalities, but who edits articles? Antisocial, egotistical wingnuts with too much time on their hands, that's who. You don't have to join the Cult of Wales to use wikipedia.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Self-absorbed schmucks like the xkcd fans who think that Wikipedia needs an article on yet another joke about Wikipedia?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
except the xkcd community doesn't think what it's doing is important, they think it's funny, and there's a world of difference there.
Cool. It's like a new and improved version of the prank involving the lengthy name of the new German Foreign Minister last year.
I've noticed this more often on the reality shows (when I catch glimpses on talk soup), the reality stars are constantly doing that, replacing the wrong word for the word they mean.
What is a person that suffers from this linguistical malady called? There must be a more clinical and less pejorative term than 'idiot.'
In the case of "reality" shows and daytime talk TV, I expect there is no more accurate word than idiot.
Who cares about pejorative? The truth hurts.
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...And does it matter? You know, disk space and bandwidth is cheap. It would cost what? $.0001 to create an article about this? And the flamewars going on about it are costing more bandwidth and disk space than the article itself would have.
Honestly, Wikipedia editors are the worst, they take what should be an encyclopedia filled with -everything- and try to narrow it down to fit what they want.
Does Wikipedia -lose- anything if it accepts an article that is a word coined by xkcd? Of course not.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The wikipedia is important, not the most important thing in the world but it is important. However too many admins and editors seem to think they and their individual opinions are more important than they should be.
Have you seen those pages vandalized with dozens of [citation please]? Too often it's a result of an asshole or douchebag putting the numerous [citation please] tags, just because he (usually a he) either refuses to use his brains properly, or has some personal vendetta against the contributor. Because the asshole could easily have used: "This section may contain original research or unverified claims.".
Just because you're doing it for free doesn't mean the rest of us shouldn't slag you off for not doing it properly. If you let your personal issues reduce the efficiency of a "soup kitchen" you won't be welcome for long, even if you're doing it for free and supposedly for a good cause. You're a voluntary cog in a wheel, you want to do your job? Leave your ego at the door. Few people like noisy wheels.
every kid in the world knows that it's a lot funnier to poke the bitchy guy, and everyone knows the best thing to counter is to just ignore.
Well you can either ignore people by giving them what they've whining to get... or you can ignore them by sticking to your principles and not budging.
Wikipedia is supposed to be a collection of solid, sourced information. It's not supposed to be "a source of solid, sourced information... except when it's funny not to be!"
So Wikipedia is trying to stick to their principles and not let an entry degenerate into something funny but ultimately confusing. The only proper way to actually maintain the entry is to explain the origin and popularization of the word (specifically, that it is a word mentioned in an xkcd comic). Their current solution, a redirect to the entry on xkcd, seems reasonable until the term gains further notability and there's something to actually write about in the entry.
now, wikipedians, chill out. IIRC, there's an entry on the wikipedia's rules saying that you can throw away all the rules if appropriate.
The problem with the "chill out" argument is that the perpetrator of every joke-edit and piece of vandalism would like Wikipedia to "chill out"--but to allow all those joke entries to accumulate would seriously harm the quality and credibility of Wikipedia as a whole. Why does your joke-edit warrant the "throw away the rules" exception but all the other joke-edits do not? The fair and proper solution is to not allow joke-content, and to stick to Wikipedia's principles.
So, really, I think it is the joke purveyors (well-meaning vandals?) who should chill out, and accept that the jokes they are interested in do not warrant the "throw away the rules" exception.
The correct response is "Good one. That was very funny! We are a project that lives and dies on the contributions of our users. You just demonstrated how quickly people on the internet can be motivated and organized to a single goal. We're hoping some of that energy can be directed towards making Wikipedia a better place. Thanks. -- The Management"
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TL;DR
Oh, come on, it wasn't that long. I'm sick of people being so short in their attention span that they have to complain about any piece of text not short enough for Twitter.
Bow-ties are cool.
"Wikipedia sucks! Ya man, they're not COOL enough to let my favorite webcomic make shit up on its website!"
I think XKCD has the right to make whatever jokes it wants to. I also am more of the opinion that Wikipedia should allow the article to be published. For the sake of avoiding confrontation, Wikipedia should probably chill and let it through. In reality, though, all the thousands of people who vandalize Wikipedia every day who think they're SOOO funny just mess things up for everyone else.
Wikipedia has done more for humanity's accessibility to knowledge than most of us will individually in our lifetimes. So quit being so damned rough on a website with such a huge task at hand: creating an accurate, universal encyclopedia while fighting ignorance, stupidity, and malice.
Is bbcnewsamerica.com anything to do with the BBC? I'm guessing not.... My first reaction to this story was to wonder how the BBC had ever managed to produce such a fugly website to be honest...
These guys take themselves waaay too seriously.
Who?
The XKCD fans who create a wikipedia page about a word that didn't exist until yesterday?
Or the Wikipedia admins who delete a page about a word that didn't exist until yesterday?
To be honest, I think both groups take themselves a bit too seriously. See that talk page in the summary? Yikes.
You're absolutely correct, but you're overlooking the meta-game of the ego war.
In your world people would slave over articles, post them, and they would never be looked at because they weren't notable.
In the Wikipedia world 'notability' is a standard and if the article survives, then it was worth writing in the first place.
In short, 'notability' is a cheap psychological tactic designed to get people to contribute free labor to the website, and little else. You're trying to buck that trend, which likely would either kill the site or at least kill the fervor with which the zealots maintain it.
Without getting into the argument about the notability of the term (I think it's quite notable, but I'm biased), "Malamanteau" should not have a Wikipedia entry because Wikipedia is not a dictionary, as Wikipedia will gladly point out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NOTDICT
Wikipedia is supposed to be a collection of solid, sourced information.
I'd do a 'citation' joke here, but it's just too damn easy.
Wikipedia may or may not 'supposed to' be this. But it isn't. It is, at best, a loose collection of individual best efforts that may or may not have accessible sources at the bottom of the article.
Which goes back to the original advice about not being too full of oneself...
Wikipedia is a successful project. You can read mostly well-written summaries of nearly every single area of human knowledge, and for the most part it's accurate and accessible with nice diagrams etc.
I'm also tempted by that decentralized approach, but when I think about it I know that I wouldn't want to deal with ridiculous one-off articles like malamanteau just because people are having fun dicking around. The internet should be free and decentralized, and Wikipedia's policies are arbitrary and stupid, but sometimes you just want something that works! A coherent high-quality project can't succeed with waves of Internet anarchy pounding at its foundations. If you want a project where only experts and trusted people can edit, then go buy the Encyclopedia Britannica. If you want a project that anybody can edit then you have to deal with people.
that word becomes mainstream. people make languages, and internet is people.
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Quite cromulent as well.
It's really odd the wikiadmins should be complaining about someone else making up things to put on their site. All things considered, it seems somewhat hypocritical.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
It's precisely because it's so easy for random people to document made-up stuff on Wikipedia that the wikiadmins take such a hard line about removing it. Without a serious focus on removing such articles, the encyclopedia would be flooded with them.
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[Citation Needed]
Wikipedia has made me hate those two words. Not because citing sources is bad, but Wikipedia has turned it into a parody. If you look at a real encyclopedia, it will contain a rather original text written in encyclopedic style. If you took such an article and pasted into Wikipedia you'd get dozens of [citation needed] because not every other sentence has one. Meanwhile you can pretty much load it with all the bias you want just by using biased sources despite the NPOV policy. I liked it back when you could just contribute some knowledge about a topic you knew about, today that's frowned upon as "original research" even though it isn't very original or research. That and the very questionable concept of Notability, which manages to completely not mention point of view. For example if I study local history of [city], then there's tons of information that might be notable enough for someone to put in a book and thus have decent authoritative sources. Are they then notable from the point of view of wikipedia? Did they have an impact on world history? Hardly, but if so you could delete 98% of wikipedia. How local a notability is notable? The hard questions are really answered by policy, which is why you get the politics.
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Clearly you haven't been targeted by 4chan.
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That is a very cromulent idea.
You can't win. Use "common sense" and you're being "arbitrary"; stick to a strict set of rules and you're "wikilawyering".
Well you can parse that both ways: refuse (to create) and (follow) or refuse (to create and follow). Besides which, arguably the have fairly strict rules and they do follow them (maybe: as well as humanly possible). Those rules just create a situation where a fictional place from what is apparently a fairly popular show does have an article, while a fictional place from a less popular show doesn't.
Having a notability criterion where "one fictional place is more notable then the other" doesn't seem very unlikely or unreasonable. In fact, it seems almost mandatory. Otherwise, I could make up any number of fictional places and add them. Maybe give them the same name as real places and create disambiguation pages while I'm at it.
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You're doing the same thing the "idiots" are. You're being imprecise in your language. Why don't you find the proper word to express what they are?
The problem I have with Wikipedia is that it refuses to create strict rules and follow them. It has stupid 'Notability' nonsense instead where it's just totally arbitrary.
Even if (as others argue) the 'notability' rules are quite well defined, they're vulnerable to race conditions leading to recursive self-referencing.
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Wikipedia (or rather, the people running it) is taking itself way too serious, and has for a long time now. Just read the comments of any edit war, or most of the delete request discussions.
Some seriousness is good and necessary, but when you're running a community project, you should never forget that there are only three base motivators for people to contribute stuff: Money, Fun and Fame. Since money is out, that leaves the other two. If you remove the fun by becoming too serious, you're left with a bunch of low-lifes who are trying to get the fame real life denies them in your community, usually through extended power trips. Ooops, did I just describe the average Wikipedia admin?
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