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Directory:The Wikipedia Point of View/Fans (view source)
Revision as of 07:42, 24 July 2010
, 07:42, 24 July 2010Created page with 'Fans are a large and diverse group on Wikipedia. They are mostly harmless devotees of obscure subjects like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Manga Japanese comic books] or …'
Fans are a large and diverse group on Wikipedia. They are mostly harmless devotees of obscure subjects like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Manga Japanese comic books] or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Categories_named_after_television_series TV series]. The error lies not so much in the uncritical approach to the subject as the undue weight given to a subject which is essentially ephemeral and unimportant and unencyclopedic. This is probably harmless, although not in the case of Ayn Rand, who I have discussed before. The coverage of her ideas is extensive in Wikipedia, and out of all proportion to her real importance in philosophy, which is practically nil, particularly outside the United States. Aficionados are powerful in Wikipedia because they are mostly viewed as harmless, and because there is no 'weighting' policy in the encyclopedia. Quite the reverse, there is even a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Paper#Wikipedia_is_not_a_paper_encyclopedia Wikipedia policy] that says there should be no practical limit to the number of topics it can cover. The practice of a normal reference work, which is to assign pages in rough proportion to the received importance of a subject, does not apply here. Thus the academically marginal Ayn Rand receives more coverage than Aristotle, the father of Western philosophy and easily the most important figure in the Western intellectual tradition. The article on his [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sophistical_Refutations&oldid=334913578 Sophistical Refutations], for example, is no more than a list of contents. Compare this in size and scope with any article on the nonsensical and philosophically illiterate work of Rand, e.g. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_New_Intellectual this].