Most of it is remarkably uncritical. e.g.
QUOTE
One of the remarkable achievements of Wikipedia is to show that on the internet Gresham’s Law can work in reverse: Wikipedia has turned into a relatively reliable source of information on the widest possible range of subjects because, on the whole, the good drives out the bad.
But this one is spot on (my emphasis below).
QUOTE
I have never read a word by Ayn Rand, and though I know she is an object of veneration in some surprising places (Alan Greenspan, for instance, is a fan), the little bits I have picked up always sounded a bit bonkers to me.* So this seemed a good test of Wikipedia’s much vaunted NPOV (neutral point of view): I would look her up on Wales and Sanger’s encyclopedia to find out what she’s all about. Well, it’s hard to express in mere words just how dispiriting an experience it is trying to find out about objectivism on Wikipedia. This isn’t because the entries seem biased or uncritical. It is just that they are so introverted, boring and just long. The entry on Ayn Rand herself is more than 8000 words long and covers her views on everything from economics to homosexuality in technical and mind-numbing detail. There are separate lengthy entries on objectivist metaphysics, objectivist epistemology, objectivist politics, objectivist ethics, plus entries on all Rand’s various books, including the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and entries on all the characters in these novels, and entries that offer plot summaries of these novels, and even entries on individual chapters. All of it reads as though it has been worked over far too much, and like any form of writing that is overcooked it alienates the reader by appearing to be closed off in its own private world of obsession and anxiety. Compare this with the entry on Rand in the 1993 Columbia Encyclopedia:
1905-82, American writer, b. St Petersburg, Russia. She came to the United States in 1926 and worked for many years as a screenwriter. Her novels are romantic and dramatic, and they espouse a philosophy of rational self-interest that opposes the collective of the modern welfare state. Her best-known novels include The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). In The New Intellectual (1961) she summarised her philosophy, which she called ‘objectivism’.
That’s it (with a couple of references appended), and seems admirably clear in 70 words. Also, by allocating her 70 words, the Columbia editors give some indication of what they think she’s worth: on the same page she gets more space than the French architect Joseph Jacques Ramée (1764-1842) and the Swiss novelist Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947), but fewer words than the French historian and politician Alfred Nicolas Rambaud (1842-1905), the Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) and the Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay (1852-1916). That also seems pretty clear.
