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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."
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.
...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.
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 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.