My latest personal blog post takes a swipe at WikiProject:Wikipedia's "Importance scale".

Here's hoping the Wikipedia Review community enjoys.

Greg

The existence of WP:WikiProject Wikipedia is depressing on so many levels. (On their assessment scale, WR is ranked equal in importance to Wiki software and Wikimedia Foundation, incidentally. Just saying.)

In case anyone misses the implied "bigger picture", I'm just fascinated with how the Wikipediots, culturally, are trained to follow their leader's example and even deploy an importance/ranking system to (probably sub-consciously) belittle those who don't agree with them.

I'm amused to see Simple English Wikipedia ranked high, then further amused to see that Larry Sanger has now been upgraded to high. It's good, though. Someone with clue is paying attention.

Good work, Greg. As always.

Good thing there's a pill for that …

Ja Ja

According to Jimbo-Juiced sycophants on Jimbo's talk page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...38668#Nevermind

He was just some Joseph looking for a manger.

Hardly belongs in the pantheon at all.

Ja Ja

I don't know if anyone made this comparison but it's almost like Stalin ordering Trotsky scrubbed from photos of the revolution:
http://www.newseum.org/berlinwall/commissa...reinventing.htm

Another nice example (this time it's one of the NKVD short lived bosses):
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research...g/stalin1+2.jpg

The latter example is even featured on WP itself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_manipulation

Cue that legendary Orwellian quote from SlimVirgin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=185660976


Larry History of Wikipedia

Other pages of "Top" and "High" importance are rather instructive of what's important to Wikipediots.

From the Internet culture category, "Top" subjects include: MySpace and YouTube. "High" importance includes: Newgrounds, typographical error Teh, and Caramelldansen.

In the Internet category, some "Top" topics are: Jon Postel, Submarine communications cable, and Twitter. In the "High" importance rank are: Tiscali, Cross-site request forgery, and the well-known Acid3 test.

Now, if you're talkin' birds, then your "Top" importance articles include: Anseriformes and Mousebird. But way down in the "Low" importance category, the pecking order includes: American Flamingo, the Baltimore Oriole, and the Black Swan (which includes 5 paragraphs about the homosexuality of the feathered fellow).

Keep in mind, the purpose of these rankings by importance was to know which articles to put on the CD.

I find it hard to balance the importance scales with NPOV. In theory, isn't WP:NPOV meant to be one of the most important things going?

If the idea of Wikipedia is to hold the sum of all human knowledge, what does it matter how "important" said knowledge is?

Different people use encyclopaedias for different things. The importance scale is just another example of why Wikipedia should not be considered an encyclopaedia.

After all, Family Guy episode and professional wrestlers given more weight than things that actually mean something out of their fictional universe (sorry for my lack of decent language skills right now, I'm exhausted).

As I keep saying: Shit flows downhill.

She would not have said that, if the emotional well-being of the
arrogant little toad named Wales was not of paramount importance.

Simply replace him with a more equable personality, and suddenly things would
start to improve. SV would either quit, or behave herself.