I'm not kidding. I thought I had seen some fairly trivial or esoteric articles get FAS on Wikipedia. Thought, that is, until this last Friday, when I saw this featured articled referenced on the Main Page. Well, then. So this "has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community".

I said the same thing myself, Cedric. I think the FA process has been broken for a long time. Also: I love that image.

The presence of that article, and especially its designation as one of Wikipedia's best, is good news. It shows that Wikipedia is a trivial, pointless website of, by, and for children.

i agree, but to me the repulsive thing in all of this isn't that articles like this exist, the repulsive thing is that Wikipedia purports to be an encyclopedia. again, i don't know whose fault that is: is it the Foundation's fault that they are representing Wikipedia as a serious project to gather donations? Is it the editors (and admins) fault for trying to justify their time spent on WP by reasoning that it is really important? Or is it the general public's fault for attributing a little bit of authority or importance to it?

I'm at the point now that I really don't care if Wikipedia exists (maybe I kind of hope it does) but I just wish that it wasn't taken as seriously as it is. I'm not stating that exactly how I want to, but that is the best I can describe it. It should have been seen as a bag of trivia, or a neat novelty site from the very beginning, with the encyclopedia term applied to it tongue in cheek. The blame for it being considered an encyclopedia can be spread around to self-important admins and editors, the board, and the general public.

That's the kind of article which could potentially be libelous, and may need to be oversighted. To have that as a Featured Article is foolish and irresponsible.

It's probably a copyvio anyway, quoting all the conversation verbatim.

It reminds me of the Starwars kid, which turned out to be libel.

It's "lose" not "loose"

There was a huge battle over it being a FA. Raul took some flak for it. Tony Sidaway was fighting it as part of the BLP brigade and excising all the names. Tony lost as you can see that the names remain.

I think you can see part of the drama looking at the its FA Candidate page and maybe Raul's talk archives around the time it was promoted despite considerable opposition.

The FA and GA (Good Article) processes have been under siege for months now but no one on either side seems to have made any headway.

I'm seeing some people actually fight to keep articles they've worked on off the FA Candidate list. The Knights Who Say Ni demand too many shrubberies for the FA and even GA writers to handle. People like Geogre and Giano won't even deal with it anymore. Alas.

Here it is as a featured article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tod...ember_7%2C_2007

Oops! I did mean "lose". Still, if you click on the video link in the article, I think you will find "loose" works here, too.

It's an excellent article, and having it on the main page is an excellent demonstration of the scope of Wikipedia's content.

Good point.

Dismissing the article because it's just about 'A guy losing his temper on a bus' is like dismissing Rosa Parks because she's just some uppity black gal that wouldn't go to the back of the bus. A quality article is a quality article, no matter the topic. Actions can have repercussions that reverberate beyond the incident itself.

Are you out of your mind?

I think his point was that you guys were characterizing the article subject in a way that overlooked its notability.

Indeed, this video will be remembered long after Rosa Parks is forgotten. Won't it?

I was actually in Hong Kong for most of July and August 2006, and never heard anything about this video. Make of that what you will...

"How long will it be remembered" is a classic (and classically bad) deletionist argument. Notability should be accessed by looking at the attention something has received in the past and present--future attention is irrelevant, and we can only guess at it anyway.

Rosa Parks seems non-notable if you describe her as just some woman who wouldn't leave her seat. She only seems notable when you tell the bigger story. Likewise, this article's subject seems non-notable if you say it's just some guy bitching on a bus. But if you look at the attention it received, it appears notable.

The problem with that argument, as I'm sure you've been reminded ad nauseam, is that in the internet (and camera-phone) age, the whole concept of "attention received" is skewed to the point of absurdity. I doubt it's even possible now to gauge an event's historical or cultural impact in comparison with similar events from before, say, 1995. Anything that happens, no matter how trivial, is immediately commented upon by everyone, in ways that can be searched, tracked, backtracked, and pinged for an almost indefinite period of time...

I'm afraid the common-sense approach is to say, yeah, this is just some guy bitching on a bus. The fact that it got a lot of attention isn't because it's significant, it's because it was entertaining for some limited period of time. People talked about it because they like to talk, and they now have a platform for talking that they didn't have before, and that everyone can read whenever they want, perhaps indefinitely. In some ways, this is now the most well-documented era in human history. And in some ways, it's also the most poorly-documented era in human history, because we're documenting all the wrong things in all the wrong ways.

So now, some guy who got bitched at by some guy on a bus has to deal with the fact that everyone in the world knows about it and has seen it, and probably laughed at it. Maybe he doesn't care, though... At least I hope he doesn't!

Even if you required something be covered by traditional mainstream publications to be considered notable, I could still mount a strong defense in favor of The Bus Uncle. Check out some of the citations: The Bus Uncle received mentions in the Wall Street Journal(Including a 1300 word article on the front page), The Times, USA Today, and many other reputable, mainstream publications. You might dismiss "BUT OVER NINE THOUSAND PEOPLE HAVE WATCHED IT ON YOUTUBE!", but the front-page of the WSJ's no small feat.

Admitting that given WP's lack of consistency in formating citations there is some variation of how to count such things, Rosa Parks is supported by 26 references. Bus Fool is supported by 35 references. This meets my criteria for Mock-Worthy.

The issue is that Wikipedia is supposed to be a serious encyclopaedia. OK, have an article about a trivial incident on a bus. But why paste it on the front page as an example of the best that this serious encyclopaedia has to offer?

Wikipedia claims itself as an open source encyclopedia, while it is not open source. I reiterate that open source softwares sourcecode can not be modified in realtime from the web for its next update. No open source community which really cares for its product will permit such a thing.

If it is really opensource project one is after, Blender, Gimp and many other projects exist, Wikipedia is not one of them and this featured article is just an indication. Its like a programmer adding RAID 0 software emulation for Windows XP through Blender which is meant to be a 3D modeling software.

I wonder if "there oughta be a law"... another Internet Law on the order of Godwin's Law, pertaining to attempts to compare somebody to Rosa Parks, or some incident to her refusal to give up her seat on a bus.

I think the comparison here is appropriate. As a superficial "hook" both incidents occurred on a bus. One was the act of individual courage of great social import taking significant period of time for the world to fully appreciate . One was of no matter, merely recording an embarrassing incident and becoming well known by instant transmission of meaningless information. Wikipedia is incapable of discerning any difference and regards both as equally encyclopedic.

There is Law... Section 230 of the CDA Which, currently protects Wikipedia from the 1st amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America (lest we forget that the Wiki servers as well as most of the foundation member are under that law), bearing in mind defamation and copyright violations are not protected speech.


The problem is that

A. Wikipeida, pretends to be an Online open Encyclopedia and service provider (For we know it's not). Wikipedia, is a lawless, festering open sewer of slander, copyright violations, and a MMOG wraped up in one. The wiki board's oversight malfeasances enables all of this and bears, personally, the final responsibility for all of it.

B. Section 230 of the CDA allow Wikipedia to get way with that "lie" of being a "server provider" but in reality, Wikipeida behaves and acts as a "content provider. As a content provider, if it was defined, in law, as such, Wikipedia would be subject to the same requirements and disipline as new papers and printed magazines.

If Section 230 is changed, it would put wiki foundation board, sysops, Admins (all of them even the snot nose (Squeakers ) - the lot, responsible, and accountable for their actions. This is not computer game of everquest or war craft, it's REAL LIVE and with Real consequences for hurt and pain cause by wiki's published lies, defamation, and mis-information.

A Wikipedian would retort that neither act was especially important, it was the conincidental consequences (not reasonably forseeable in either case) of the acts that mattered.

Sadly for them, only one set of consequences mattered.

Um, I don't think anybody believes that. There are degrees of notability. Rose Parks is way more notable than the Bus Uncle, but the Bus Uncle is still notable.

Of course, it will be necessary to wait 50 years to see what long-term notability, if any, develops from that case and how it compares with that of Parks, though it seems rather unlikely that there will be any kind of comparable long term effect.

Rosa Parks wasn't making a spontaneous protest. It had been planned carefully and had more or less the intended consequences. What if any could be the consequences of the Bus Uncle?

Well WP:NOT Crystal Ball for the moment then, and if anyone cares in half a century feel free to create it.

Oh, sorry. No Wikipedia. Never mind!



Feel free to correct me, as in truth I don't know that much about it, but I don't know if she intended it to be as important as it actually was.

Like I said, I was in Hong Kong for about two months just after the "Bus Uncle" incident. No consequences then, no consequences now...

The people who put her up to it were hoping it would be.