Dumb Shit on Wikipedia

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Here's a good one: the articles on notable Roman political families are a giant fucked-up mess. First, a little context. Roman political families (often called Famous Families) were interesting because you saw the same families reach high political offices and maintain their economic/political influence for decades, even for centuries. Some families were plebian, some were patrician. Some started out patrician and lost patrician status, some deliberately abjured patrician status to be plebian (Publius Clodius being a famous example of the latter, having himself adopted as an adult by a plebian so he would no longer be a patrician Claudian and could run for office as a Tribune of the Plebs, a great office for his brand of populist demagoguery). There were families with the same name with both plebian and patrician branches. like the Servilians and the Junii.

Here's where it starts getting interesting: slaves and freedmen. In Roman society, there was nothing at all preventing a slave from being freed, and every slave was theoretically paid a salary which most saved up in the hope of accumulating enough to purchase their freedom. This was extremely common, in fact. Now, when a slave was freed, he took his old master's name and added his own name to it. So, say a slave named Burgundus was owned by a Gaius Julius Caesar, to take an actual example. After being manumitted, he became Gaius Julius Burgundus. Rich and powerful families might have owned and manumitted thousands and thousands of slaves over the centuries, each of which took the name of their former owners. Most of the freedmen remained poor and powerless and not notable, but there was nothing to prevent a freedman from becoming wealthy in his own right, or powerful enough to be notable. The Romans themselves were well aware of who was who and would never have mistaken a noble Roman with a slave that had a noble Roman's name from manumission. Not so our wikipedia autists.

The wikipedia pages on noble Roman families used to be pretty good, with lots of citations and references. Not any more. Nowadays, every single article on a Roman noble family is a complete mess. The article writers now cram every single known Roman with the same family name into the article. Former slaves, descendants of former slaves, patrician, plebian, doesn't matter: they're all stuck in there as if they're all part of the same family. It makes these articles completely worthless as a reference.

It gets really bad from about the Social War on through the Julio-Claudian Emperors, as the old noble families were progressively hollowed out or destroyed by civil war casualties, proscriptions, and persecution by various emperors, especially Caligula. At the same time, freedmen and the descendants of freedmen became more wealthy, powerful, and prominent. There are a few articles I've seen where I know that the noble family was completely destroyed, but freedmen/freedmen descendants continued to be rich and hold political office for hundreds of years. Guess who gets stuck in the article for the extinct noble family? Yep, dozens of completely unrelated people.

Maybe it's just my autism, but it really annoys me. It's just so obvious that these articles are written by people who don't have a clue what they're talking about.
 
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Gwydion said:
Here's a good one: the articles on notable Roman political families are a giant fucked-up mess. First, a little context. Roman political families (often called Famous Families) were interesting because you saw the same families reach high political offices and maintain their economic/political influence for decades, even for centuries. Some families were plebian, some were patrician. Some started out patrician and lost patrician status, some deliberately abjured patrician status to be plebian (Publius Clodius being a famous example of the latter, having himself adopted as an adult by a plebian so he would no longer be a patrician Claudian and could run for office as a Tribune of the Plebs, a great office for his brand of populist demagoguery). There were families with the same name with both plebian and patrician branches. like the Servilians and the Junii.

Here's where it starts getting interesting: slaves and freedmen. In Roman society, there was nothing at all preventing a slave from being freed, and every slave was theoretically paid a salary which most saved up in the hope of accumulating enough to purchase their freedom. This was extremely common, in fact. Now, when a slave was freed, he took his old master's name and added his own name to it. So, say a slave named Burgundus was owned by a Gaius Julius Caesar, to take an actual example. After being manumitted, he became Gaius Julius Burgundus. Rich and powerful families might have owned and manumitted thousands and thousands of slaves over the centuries, each of which took the name of their former owners. Most of the freedmen remained poor and powerless and not notable, but there was nothing to prevent a freedman from becoming wealthy in his own right, or powerful enough to be notable. The Romans themselves were well aware of who was who and would never have mistaken a noble Roman with a slave that had a noble Roman's name from manumission. Not so our wikipedia autists.

The wikipedia pages on noble Roman families used to be pretty good, with lots of citations and references. Not any more. Nowadays, every single article on a Roman noble family is a complete mess. The article writers now cram every single known Roman with the same family name into the article. Former slaves, descendants of former slaves, patrician, plebian, doesn't matter: they're all stuck in there as if they're all part of the same family. It makes these articles completely worthless as a reference.

It gets really bad from about the Social War on through the Julio-Claudian Emperors, as the old noble families were progressively hollowed out or destroyed by civil war casualties, proscriptions, and persecution by various emperors, especially Caligula. At the same time, freedmen and the descendants of freedmen became more wealthy, powerful, and prominent. There are a few articles I've seen where I know that the noble family was completely destroyed, but freedmen/freedmen descendants continued to be rich and hold political office for hundreds of years. Guess who gets stuck in the article for the extinct noble family? Yep, dozens of completely unrelated people.

Maybe it's just my autism, but it really annoys me. It's just so obvious that these articles are written by people who don't have a clue what they're talking about.
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Its almost as bad the exonym articles which are hilariously awful on so so so many levels
 
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Returning to inconsistent documentation, we have Columbo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Columbo_episodes

Zero episode pages. If you're not familiar with the show, then you're probably wondering why, but let me just mention a few:
  • Murder By The Book: The first seasoned episode, and Steven Spielberg's directorial debut, 1 year before Duel.
  • Any Port In A Storm: Widely considered the best episode of the show ever, and infinitely memorable thanks to Donald Pleasance's role as Adrian Carsini.
  • Now You See Him: One of Jack Cassidy's final credits before his gruesome death at the end of the year it came out.
  • Columbo Goes To College: Considered the best of his 1989 - 2003 episodes, and one of the best of the series as a whole.
  • Columbo Likes The Nightlife: The final episode, and one of Peter Falk's final roles.
You're telling me none of these warrant individual episode pages? But some random bumfuck episode of 15th season Family Guy does?
 
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Wikipedia Admin GorillaWarfare came out and said it. I imagine that means others are similar.

arrow.jpg


nazi.jpg
 
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Becky McDonald said:
Returning to inconsistent documentation, we have Columbo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Columbo_episodes

Zero episode pages. If you're not familiar with the show, then you're probably wondering why, but let me just mention a few:
  • Murder By The Book: The first seasoned episode, and Steven Spielberg's directorial debut, 1 year before Duel.
  • Any Port In A Storm: Widely considered the best episode of the show ever, and infinitely memorable thanks to Donald Pleasance's role as Adrian Carsini.
  • Now You See Him: One of Jack Cassidy's final credits before his gruesome death at the end of the year it came out.
  • Columbo Goes To College: Considered the best of his 1989 - 2003 episodes, and one of the best of the series as a whole.
  • Columbo Likes The Nightlife: The final episode, and one of Peter Falk's final roles.
You're telling me none of these warrant individual episode pages? But some random bumfuck episode of 15th season Family Guy does?
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This is totally off topic but none of those were among my favorites. A friend in deed was probably my favorite.

In general I don't think that individual TV episode should have their own articles unless they are notable on their own not merely as an episode of a popular TV show because then it starts to get really krufty.
 
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BootlegPopeye said:
This is totally off topic but none of those were among my favorites. A friend in deed was probably my favorite.

In general I don't think that individual TV episode should have their own articles unless they are notable on their own not merely as an episode of a popular TV show because then it starts to get really krufty.
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That's kind of my point; there's absolutely no reason as to why so many episodes of American animated shows in particular need their own pages. Because then you get situations where shows that do have notable episodes (at the very least, MBTB because of Spielberg's involvement, and perhaps Ransom For A Dead Man because it was released theatrically in Europe) don't get documented because their fanbase aren't the typical wikipedo fare.

Simpsons, for instance, could be knocked right down to perhaps ~20 sub-pages; the Ullman shorts, Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire (first episode), one for Treehouse of Horror as an entirety, the Michael Jackson ep, Who Shot Mr. Burns (because of its Dallas reference and how it renewed interest in the show) the Scorpio and Grimes episodes, Principal And The Pauper because how it's become the scapegoat for an entire generation who arbitrarily decided it was the shark jump point, Alone Again (because of Maude's death), Behind The Laughter due to its meta-narrative, and maybe a few others that had a similar cultural impact. You do not need pages for every fucking episode, ever. That's for Wikia and other projects to do.
 
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Becky McDonald said:
Returning to inconsistent documentation, we have Columbo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Columbo_episodes
were
Zero episode pages. If you're not familiar with the show, then you're probably wondering why, but let me just mention a few:
  • Murder By The Book: The first seasoned episode, and Steven Spielberg's directorial debut, 1 year before Duel.
  • Any Port In A Storm: Widely considered the best episode of the show ever, and infinitely memorable thanks to Donald Pleasance's role as Adrian Carsini.
  • Now You See Him: One of Jack Cassidy's final credits before his gruesome death at the end of the year it came out.
  • Columbo Goes To College: Considered the best of his 1989 - 2003 episodes, and one of the best of the series as a whole.
  • Columbo Likes The Nightlife: The final episode, and one of Peter Falk's final roles.
You're telling me none of these warrant individual episode pages? But some random bumfuck episode of 15th season Family Guy does?
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Just to somewhat defend Wikipedia here, I suspect these articles don't exist simply because no one has taken the trouble to write them. Probably not many Columbo fans are also Wikipedia editors, especially given the age demographics. This could be a legit example of systemic bias, where many topics are inadequately covered (and others are obsessively covered).

If such episode articles had been written, and the community !voted to delete them, that would be different and not defensible, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
 
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ICametoLurk said:
Have a laugh at the talk page on chicken keeeeev
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Chicken_Kiev

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:M113_armored_personnel_carrier/Archive_2#Clarification_of_Unofficial_Nickname_"Gavin"

tl;dr Mike Sparks, a military analyst or something, nicknamed the M113 "Gavin" and now there's always a shitstorm when you mention it.


REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE Wikipedia says Biden won 2020!
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how much of an ideological retard do you have to be to say the Russians also pronounced it Kyiv, so calling it Kiev is revisionism?
 
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WhiteNight said:
Just to somewhat defend Wikipedia here, I suspect these articles don't exist simply because no one has taken the trouble to write them. Probably not many Columbo fans are also Wikipedia editors, especially given the age demographics. This could be a legit example of systemic bias, where many topics are inadequately covered (and others are obsessively covered).

If such episode articles had been written, and the community !voted to delete them, that would be different and not defensible, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
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Another thing is that Wikipedia's policies have gotten stricter over the years, so what would have been permitted at its inception might not be acceptable now. Wikipedia's purely volunteer-driven when it comes to content, and with the encyclopedia being as big as it is (over six million articles) a lot of areas are going to be left unattended.
 
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9Style said:
Wikipedia Admin GorillaWarfare came out and said it. I imagine that means others are similar.

View attachment 3483380

View attachment 3483379
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Why does she hate crypto so much? Is it because evil wrong thinkers use it to finance themselves or something like most of these tards? I take it with the three arrows thing she is your typical lefty even though the three arrows have a specific meaning from the Weimar Era.

Anti-Monarchism
Anti-Fascism
Anti- Communism

Wonder if she knows that.
 
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Gwydion said:
Here's a good one: the articles on notable Roman political families are a giant fucked-up mess. First, a little context. Roman political families (often called Famous Families) were interesting because you saw the same families reach high political offices and maintain their economic/political influence for decades, even for centuries. Some families were plebian, some were patrician. Some started out patrician and lost patrician status, some deliberately abjured patrician status to be plebian (Publius Clodius being a famous example of the latter, having himself adopted as an adult by a plebian so he would no longer be a patrician Claudian and could run for office as a Tribune of the Plebs, a great office for his brand of populist demagoguery). There were families with the same name with both plebian and patrician branches. like the Servilians and the Junii.

Here's where it starts getting interesting: slaves and freedmen. In Roman society, there was nothing at all preventing a slave from being freed, and every slave was theoretically paid a salary which most saved up in the hope of accumulating enough to purchase their freedom. This was extremely common, in fact. Now, when a slave was freed, he took his old master's name and added his own name to it. So, say a slave named Burgundus was owned by a Gaius Julius Caesar, to take an actual example. After being manumitted, he became Gaius Julius Burgundus. Rich and powerful families might have owned and manumitted thousands and thousands of slaves over the centuries, each of which took the name of their former owners. Most of the freedmen remained poor and powerless and not notable, but there was nothing to prevent a freedman from becoming wealthy in his own right, or powerful enough to be notable. The Romans themselves were well aware of who was who and would never have mistaken a noble Roman with a slave that had a noble Roman's name from manumission. Not so our wikipedia autists.

The wikipedia pages on noble Roman families used to be pretty good, with lots of citations and references. Not any more. Nowadays, every single article on a Roman noble family is a complete mess. The article writers now cram every single known Roman with the same family name into the article. Former slaves, descendants of former slaves, patrician, plebian, doesn't matter: they're all stuck in there as if they're all part of the same family. It makes these articles completely worthless as a reference.

It gets really bad from about the Social War on through the Julio-Claudian Emperors, as the old noble families were progressively hollowed out or destroyed by civil war casualties, proscriptions, and persecution by various emperors, especially Caligula. At the same time, freedmen and the descendants of freedmen became more wealthy, powerful, and prominent. There are a few articles I've seen where I know that the noble family was completely destroyed, but freedmen/freedmen descendants continued to be rich and hold political office for hundreds of years. Guess who gets stuck in the article for the extinct noble family? Yep, dozens of completely unrelated people.

Maybe it's just my autism, but it really annoys me. It's just so obvious that these articles are written by people who don't have a clue what they're talking about.
Click to expand...

Trying to keep "list of [things]" articles sane is a large task that requires a lot of attention. Many years ago I tried it for a few articles, but people kept adding unrelated stuff in drive-by edits and I kept removing it. I put in comments in the article, I put bold text at the top. Nothing helped. I gave up eventually.

"The encyclopedia anyone can edit" is great in principle, but fails quite a lot in practice. A well-intentioned 15-year old from Spain or whatnot will happily just insert [random crap. It's a real chore to have to keep cleaning it up. "I'm helping!" ... yeah, not really. And then add the trolls and buddyloid spergs and whatnot...
 
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Hồ Chí Minh said:
Trying to keep "list of [things]" articles sane is a large task that requires a lot of attention. Many years ago I tried it for a few articles, but people kept adding unrelated stuff in drive-by edits and I kept removing it. I put in comments in the article, I put bold text at the top. Nothing helped. I gave up eventually.

"The encyclopedia anyone can edit" is great in principle, but fails quite a lot in practice. A well-intentioned 15-year old from Spain or whatnot will happily just insert [random crap. It's a real chore to have to keep cleaning it up. "I'm helping!" ... yeah, not really. And then add the trolls and buddyloid spergs and whatnot...
Click to expand...

When I was much younger I did a lot of grammatical and spelling edits there. Think it was the few months after residency, I had nothing but time. If I tried to edit there now, even to fix a spelling mistake, it would be reverted immediately and an argument about "why is someone editing this page about (useless information nobody really needs to care about)!?!"

it's changed a lot, if you look through editors with more than a few years there you see a lot are completely inactive.
 
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