Check out the article about [[Consumer economy]].

Note the scattered mixing of hyphens and dashes. Note the clumsy introduction, including this gem of prose:


Then note this glorious bit of original research, which is cited to an essay site:


As recently as eight months ago, the article had been trimmed to three sentences, virtually unchanged from the text of February 2005.

This article was created in January 2005 as a frightening opinion piece about "hoarding", "gifting", and emotional isolation. Since then, it's been viewed approximately 16,000 to 24,000 times.

This is the best Wikipedia can do to teach that girl in Africa about a subject as important as the consumer economy?

This is your Wikipedia, consumers. Eat it up.

And this is the only referenced part of the essay:

"Being a consumer, I am personally thrilled to see this change in the retailer-consumer relationship. I was never aware of the losses that businesses suffered when their products did not sell to their expectations, understanding what the consumer desires will greatly improve this condition of waste. I have learned about the value of communication between the retailer and the consumer, without communication the marketers are sending a one-way message to the consumer, and neither elicits a desired response. The fact that business has become consumer driver will greatly effect the satisfaction of both parties."

You realize that if the Wikipedia editors were the navigators on the Santa Maria, Columbus would have discovered Spain.

Not to mention, of course it is the #1 Google search result for the subject.

How do you find these Greg? That one is a masterpiece.

Long live Wikipedia, for representing the economic sciences so convincingly.

I told you all that Wikipedia's articles on finance are garbage. Although this one is especially choice garbage, I must admit.

I'm at a loss as to what investment strategy or book this article must have been created to pimp. It looks more like someone trying to sell an "advanced targeted advertising system".

Honestly? Because I am writing a blog article about the possible transition from a "Consumer Economy" to a "Human Economy", as posited in 2007 by Shari Swan at a research conference I attended. I wanted to give some examples of symbols or emblems of the consumer economy, and I began with the top 10 Google search results for this phrase.

It's not like I'm deliberately seeking out the awfulness of Wikipedia. It's just that it's so pervasively awful, you can't help but to encounter garbage like this on a regular basis, if you're still intelligent enough to think for yourself, remember the old tested techniques of research and synthesis, and not accept this prattle as "human knowledge".

The funny thing -- I am now writing up an economics article that includes interviews with the head of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta, economics professors at major U.S. colleges, presidents of prominent U.S. banks and economists at think tanks. And I look at the WP article and Greg's Google info, and I really want to cry -- there are few things more tragic than stupid people who are blissfully unaware of their stupidity.

Not unlike Trix cereal, Wikipedia is strictly for kids.

And now Crotalus Horridus (T-C-L-K-R-D) reduces it to just the lead paragraph -- without fixing any of the glaring flaws therein. To be fair, it's now just back at the same place it was four and a half years ago, with added wikidecorations. I suppose it's too much to expect a Wikipedia editor to actually, oh, I don't know, write something.

Might as well trim it to say "The consumer economy exists." That would be just as informative, and less inaccurate.

"As such, the subject is of special interest to economists." But not, apparently, to Wikipedians.

I am glad to see Crotalus Horridus regularly reads Wikipedia Review -- unless this is one of these Chzz and the Dragon fantasies were people miraculously stumble upon a communal computer open to a specific Wikipedia page and decide "WTF, I think I will edit."

I don't know which country's "consumer economy" this article refers to, but it sure as hell doesn't look like anything we have in the U.S.

It keeps getting smaller. Soon there will be no such thing as a consumer economy.

Where's Ayn Rand when you really need her?

Badly need a photoshoped Rand-zombie, here. Naked walking cadaver of an elderly female, clad only in ratty fur coat with dollar-sign, with lit cigarrette in long holder, Cruella de Vil style.

Gotta shoot this one though the brain, boys! A heart-shot is ineffective on zombies, even if you could hit it. Which in this case would be particularly hard.

And still it is 100% nonsense.

I would like to invite up to three people to help build a better encyclopedia article about the consumer economy than what Wikipedia provides.

I will pay $15 to each of the first three contributors to the article who make an earnest effort to accurately introduce content that expands the academic quality of this new article. At least ten complete sentences, drawing on at least two different available (and duly cited) secondary sources, are required to qualify for the payment.

The content is published with "all rights reserved" by the component contributor(s) to the article. Copying or re-use will only be authorized if unanimous agreement is achieved among the surviving authors of the article.

Consider this an experimental challenge that might add evidential data to the debate over the quality of freely licensed, volunteered, open-source content versus traditional, copyrighted publishing.

(Note: the article is already significantly superior to Wikipedia's article.)

Seriously, crickets?

Guess so. Sorry, I wouldn't touch that one for $15,000.

You could go and tell the ARS twats about it.....if you're feeling self-abusive, anyway.

Eric, is the subject matter that repulsive?

From reading your comment, it strikes me that you may have interpreted my appeal to mean that we'd build an article ON WIKIPEDIA. Far from it! I'm asking for help on a rights-reserved article OFF WIKIPEDIA.

I mean, why would I contact the ARS kids for help on my website?

I 2nd that emoticon —

WP →

Ja Ja

Uh ohhh! Could Wikipedia's article be headed for deletion, after nearly 5 years of collaborative effort?

Kids??? Ikip, A Nobody, Drmies, MichaelQSchmidt...kids?

Those are pretty damn elderly children.

So, I have a question...

If I can't even practically give away $15 (for five sentences and two sources cited) for a bit of paid editing on a relatively impartial, boring subject that might take someone 15 minutes to complete... Why is Wikipedia so terrified of paid editing?

Is $60 an hour an insult or something?

Serious answer; because although it looks simple on the surface, you've actually picked a bummer of a topic. This is one of those things where either you have a worthless stub "the consumer economy is the economy of consumer goods and services", or you have a long article discussing the effects of varying inputs, varying ideological superstructures controlling production, distribution and exchange, varying attitudes of consumers, and varying attitudes to what constitutes consumption as opposed to investment; you then need to globalize the whole thing (what would be considered the "consumer economy" in Pennsylvania doesn't necessarily include the same goods and services as the consumer economy of West Europe, let alone China or Africa), and put the whole thing in a historic context, which in turn means going back to Marx and Smith. Given the choice between (a) spending the best part of two weeks summarizing Capital for the benefit of the 30 people a day who care, or (b) watching I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! while eating yesterday's leftover pizza, I know which I'd choose.

Neither of your options pay you $15 to just throw together 5 sentences drawn from 2 cited sources. If you think that would take you two weeks, then I feel bad for you and your arthritis and blindness.



If you wish to test your hypothesis, though... I'm happy to comply. Find an article stub on Wikipedia that is not a "bummer of a topic" that has fewer than 5 sentences and no reference citations. The subject, when typed into Google, must produce at least two "sponsored links" (contextual ads).

I will make the same payment offer to expand that article on Wikipedia Review, and we'll see if we get any takers.

(By the way, a click on the George Soros ad on my "Consumer economy" article yielded $2.55. That's a powerful ad.)

I suspect that your hypothesis will not bear fruit, Eva; but I'm eager to give it a shot.

Greg


Edit: Forgot to include smiley face -- I was totally making a joke there about arthritis and blindness.

Bumping thread, to underscore that I wasn't trying to be mean.

Well, we're talking about ol' Moneybags Soros.

Yes. It insults wikipedia to give money to anybody they don't have to. Why pay a cow when milk's free?

Since real dollars are obviously never going to be used for Wikipedia editing, I propose an artifical unit like the Linden Dollar in Second Life. Except that on WP, these would be Suck-Up Dollars (SUDs).

You wondered how Jimbo was going to pay Guy Chapman for editing Ms. Marden's BLP, just as soon as he got the details. Well, there Jimbo gets paid in (ahem) a certain alternative currency, and JzG get SUDs.

And all those people who edited Mzoli's into some kind of semblance of an encyclopedia article, after Jimbo embarrassed himself by starting it? Paid in SUDs, every one.

I'm not sure how fungible SUDs are in the real world, but I propose within WP, it should be 10 SUD's per supporting vote, and 100 SUDs per barnstar.

I think SlimVirgin once had accumulated enough SUDs to buy the Wiki Taj Mahal. But since then has made some bad investments and now lives more quietly, on a fixed SUD income.

Well, the Wikipedia article about consumer economy is now properly sourced to a for-profit, subscription-only educational curriculum company's content.

The entire article reads:



Meanwhile, the Wikipedia Review article about consumer economy is three paragraphs long, and there's still $30 to be earned by willing contributors. The first $15 payment has been disbursed.

Searching Google for "consumer economy", the Wikipedia sentence comes up #1, while the three paragraphs at Wikipedia Review earn a #23 spot in the results.