i am sorry for my disrespect
sorry for my lies

:-(

Sorry for my dialect,
and my pumpkin pies...

i don't think Biggie Smalls, despite his physique, ever rapped about PUMPKIN PIES

Nopsie, just sex and violence.

Some say the spies, make the pies
Spec-tacular, make me lick it from da fork
On da plate, then ya, shiverin, tongue deliverin
Taste of that pumpkin, that pie is jumpkin
Skip the milk and the cookies, no Oreos tonight
If its alright with you, we slicin' dat pie

I thought Wikipedia had lost its capacity to surprise me. I was wrong.

Where I come from, there is a word for this.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

To be fair, that's in good part a reflection on our general culture rather than being specific to Wikipedia.

Ever culture has its reliquaries. The reliquary of the tooth of Mary Magdelene . The requiquary of the lock of hair of Justin Beiber. You can start to worry when either the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquires Beiber's hair, or else they start building a cathedral around it.

Even so, it's not THAT much more silly than Catholicism.

Oh, I totally agree with that - I'm willing to bet that pretty much every culture at every point in history was more or less just as goofy as ours. It's just the fog of history and the dulling vapors of romanticism that make it seem otherwise. Seriously, when Mozart was around, how many people do you think actually listened to the guy (putting aside the fact that he's over rated). I tell you how many. Two. Everyone else was listening to some roadside tavern version of Justin Bieber (of course in those times, each village had to have its own version of JB, and some did worse than others). But that stuff never got recorded so we were spared it. Or it got passed through the generation but thanks to the passage of time it now seems quaint and "authentic" (ugh). But now we record every single damn thing.

So anyway, my standard of comparison, was my somewhat idealized version of what culture we should have, rather than any kind of historical comparison. You know, I was being elitist.

btw, that article was apparently created as a (very awesome and hillarious) violation of WP:POINT (bad editor! bad!),

And most of that now gets posted to Soundcloud.
It contains millions of music recordings--mostly utter crap, and remixes of crap.
Plus millions of recorded voices of bored teenagers, making fools of themselves.

Sorta like Wikipedia with a mic, ya know?.....

This article *retch* has it all - no notability, bad sources, poorly written, riddled with errors, and offensive to an entire language.

I present: Portuguese_profanity (T-H-L-K-D).

From Terrence Malick (T-H-L-K-D):

Seriously?

I've been in Ottawa, and I don't see how it could be confused with Waco. They really aren't that much like another, not to mention separated by a thousand miles or so.

That's what happens when sources don't agree. I've done it myself.

That's horrible writing. That ought to read "Alexander's birthplace is disputed; various sources report his birthplace as either Denver, Colorado, or Missouri." A discussion as to which has the greater support would seem meritorious as well. But that would required doing more than just collating data; it would, in fact, smell rather heavily of the dreaded "original research" which we all know is prohibited at Wikipedia. That's one of the ways, in fact, that Wikipedia ensures that article quality stays low.

This page has had an interesting history.

Yet that would in itself be original research, no? Or is it synthesis? I fail to sometimes distinguish them. You cannot say that something is disputed unless you have a reliable source that says that there is a dispute. Having contradictory sources does not "prove" that.

I'll post in here since it's minor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_parl..._election,_1945

Now I don't consider it a bad article (mainly because I wrote 99% of it) but it does, I feel, demonstrate a weakness on Wikipedia's part. I originally called it "Albanian Constituent Assembly election, 1945" but some guy with a 2000-page general elections book (for which he gives "thanks to Wikimedia UK, who provided me with a grant to purchase" it) decided that it had to be a "parliamentary" election because, well, that general reference book which had to provide general information on thousands of elections across Europe deemed it so. Normally one would think "hey, Albania in 1945 didn't have a parliament, ergo it couldn't possibly have had a parliamentary election," but verifiability not truth reigns and all that. Said guy had used the book in Albanian election articles before and apparently decided that it was infallible.

So naturally it's put up to a vote. I provide 5 sources (and another one in the main article), of which 2 were Albanian government-published texts given official English-language translations, 5 Western academic works on Albanian history, and 1 academic book on post-1989 Balkan history. Opposing user continues using his 2000-page general elections book as a defense. No one cares about Albania so no one except me and him* vote on the subject of changing the article's name back.

The result? "No consensus to move."



* Inasmuch as it concerned his book.

Here is a good example of the editor who says "I'm so clever! I know better than standard references!"

You may think that he has disproved a widely held but misinformed idea, no? It is on the contrary, of course, more likely that Scaliger only said that it was named after Julius Caesar and in fact was deliberately honouring his father. To avoid any charge of original research, the article could be re-worded as "Scaliger claimed to have called it Julian in honour of Julius Caesar. However, many references say ..."

from Roseanna Vitro (T-H-L-K-D), this may be my favorite sentence of all time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Epir...iberation_Front

72% of the sources of this article come from a single book. Normally that wouldn't be too bad except said source says about Albanians, among other things, the following: "In marked contrast to the Albanian, the Northern Epirote was devoted to learning and the cultivation of those virutes collectively termed civilization." (p. 52) "It is not my intention to heap scorn upon the Albanians because they have had the misfortune to enter the Twentieth Century little more advanced than they left the First, but it it s a fact that must be recognized. It explains much about them and the quality of leaders they have produced—as well as the misery to which their rule has reduced Northern Epirus." (p. 7) He also claims that Albanians were basically too savage to want to have an alphabet, among other wonderful and totally not racist claims.

But hey, the author can be a racist but at least the information isn't wrong, right?

Except the only source that the organization was anything more than a very minor element in the whole history of Albania's war against fascist occupation (one will look in vain to find it in literally any other history book about Albania) is... the author of said racist book. And he provides no sources. And no academic work actually cites said book.

On the talk page we see a bit of the worst sort of things Wikipedia can cause: User A notes that the article is making claims completely different from those of every other source on Albanian history (including greatly exaggerating the influence of the organization and the "battles" it supposedly engaged in), User B who originally inserted said information into the article denounces A, User A points out unreliability and inconsistencies of accounts of book cited by User B, User B searches Google and Google Books in a desperate attempt to kinda-sorta provide meager support for the book he swears by. User A points out irrelevancy of those "sources" but eventually gives up because of obstinate stand of User B. User B enjoys confidence in keeping an article in a state in which it details events that never happened.

These things happen in Albania. It is a strange country where many have huge chips all over their shoulders, sometimes for good reasons. Is this book published by a reputable publisher or is it self-published? And might User B have some connection with its author?

It was published, as far as I can see, by a small Greek-American publishing company. The author himself (I actually brought the book just because I wanted a different take on North Epirus, which was a bad idea because it's a really lame book) is not an academic and his two main qualifications seem to be that he himself is Greek and that he contributed articles on things to the Long Island Star-Journal. The dust jacket also proudly states that he fought in the Korean War.

So no, not really.

User B is Greek. Author of the book is Greek. User B has a history of trying to put forward all sorts of North Epirus claims on various Albanian articles. He's joined occasionally by another Greek nationalist.

The Trotskyism article is very obviously written by his adherents. Where else would one find something like this:
The article on "Stalinism" sucks as well, but at least it doesn't look like his adherents wrote it. It seems quite difficult to build these articles up towards good quality using the Wikipedian way.

A Brazilian guy I know pointed out that the Pedro II of Brazil article, which is a featured article, has a definite traditionalist and monarchist slant.

I don't study Brazilian history, but I find it hard to reconcile the following:
With, say, this from Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.H._Carr

As encyclopedic as a magazine or perhaps critical journal article. Complete with photos coupled with "descriptions" such as "The Face of the Future?" and "The Price of Progress?" Not to mention "The American historian Richard Pipes. In 1993 Pipes was to write that Carr's History of Soviet Russia was no different from Holocaust denial."

It looks big and scholarly at first, but underneath it all is basically one continuous "eff you, Mr. Subject" vibe. It really doesn't look very encyclopedic at all.

Did it already. That, FYI, is one of the longest biographies on Wikipedia, and is the work of one obsessed crank.

Where?

And yeah, it's long and lame. I think the sheer size of an article plays a significant role in people being reluctant to edit it.