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ynnhoj
June 16th, 2007, 02:04 PM
i was reading an article @ theglobeandmail.com yesterday about the wikipedia, called "duality of wikipedia" (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070615.wweb15/BNStory/Technology/home). here's the first bit:


Duality of Wikipedia
On one hand, it's indispensable; on the other, it's the ultimate resource on things that don't matter

IVOR TOSSELL
Globe and Mail Update
June 15, 2007 at 10:32 AM EDT

There was once an Englishman named John Locke, who had some interesting thoughts about political theory. There is also a character named John Locke on the TV show Lost.

Which one has the longer entry on Wikipedia?

To the surprise of nobody, it's not the enlightenment philosopher. This is what we call "wikigroaning": the art of highlighting Wikipedia's bias toward things that don't matter. It goes like this:

First, think up two similar topics, one being of genuine historical or social relevance, and the other being useless to everyone but a small coterie of fans. To cite the classic example, you might pick "Knights" and "Jedi Knights." Next, load up the respective Wikipedia pages of each pair, and notice their respective lengths. Hear yourself groan? There you go - you're wikigroaning!

...
funny! www.wikigroaning.com (http://www.wikigroaning.com/) (i think the term wikigroaning was actually coined by something awful, btw...) is a handy way to compare two wikipedia articles; it counts the number of characters per article, and then applies "an advanced ratio to convert those characters to Nerd Points," and draws a bar graph to show how they match up with each other.