Wikipedia:Wikipedia has more...

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A look at some of the snowclones of "Wikipedia has more information on Pokémon than on the Bible".

The way "information" is measured varies: information, articles, pages, but the theme is always that some ephemeral piece of pop culture is better covered than some serious academic "encyclopedic" subject.

The implications vary among:

• Weird but true!
• All Wikipedians are otaku/teenagers/kids/fanboys....
• Wikipedia is biased.
• Wikipedia is crap (because it covers pop culture, because it doesn't cover "serious" stuff, or because its priorities are all wrong).

And any combination of the above.

There is never any suggestion of what the ideal situation should be – How many chemists we should cover? Should we delete some of our coverage of Britney Spears? And of course never any offer to leap into the breach and help. (One early example says no-one will read Wikipedia anyway.)

Apart from the logical fallacy (assuming that because X is better covered than Y, Y is badly covered), these claims are often – as I like to say – plain wrong.

In the sections below references to "now" or "currently" should reflect the numbers (more or less) at the time of reading.

• Source: Common meme
• Verdict: Not true.
• Reason: While at the time of writing there are 376 articles in the category Pokémon (now 24), there are 1,872 just on biblical manuscripts and 1,211 on biblical scholars.

• Source: Signpost and blog
• Verdict: Not true.
• Reason: The claimant simply compared the number of chemists on a list page with the number of porn stars in a category. Comparing all chemists categories with all porn star categories we have substantially more chemists.

• Source: Comment on Guardian blog
• Verdict: Not true. But certainly more on Dylan Thomas would be welcome.
• Reason: Wikipedia has pages on seven of Thomas' works (for example A Child's Christmas in Wales), two about Thomas, two or three about productions about Thomas. We also have articles on the Dylan Thomas Centre, and two Dylan Thomas awards. There are at least three substantial articles on Megatron, so that part is pretty much confirmed.

• Source: Talk:Basque Country (autonomous community)
• Verdict: Not true (but the Basque articles do need work)
• Reason: Of the 4000 articles in the pornography project, most are stubs or very short start class articles. Even the one featured article – an actress who crossed over into the mainstream is only 80k, approximately comparing with the three lead geography articles in WikiProject Basque.

• Source: Socrates vs Britney Spears
• Verdict: Maybe true, maybe not.
• Reason: "There's a lot more data available in edited sources about Spears than about Socrates, who had the misfortune of living before the Internet and before the mass media. " (User:Ihcoyc)

Note we have 22 top-level articles in Category:Socrates and we have 19 articles in Category:Britney Spears.

• Source: The New York Times
• Verdict: Apparently true at the time (January 2011), not true now.
• Reason: The Simpsons characters are easy to write about. All 45 articles have existed for years. Moreover, they are easier to categorise. At the time of writing we have 493,560 articles about writers, far more than all our fictional character articles. Note however that most, if not all, of the items that have been added to the writers category since, already existed either on English WP, or Spanish WP. (Thanks to User:Rosiestep for translation.)

"Is a category with five Mexican feminist writers impressive, or embarrassing when compared with the 45 articles on characters in The Simpsons? "

Note the MFW's now number 57, while the Simpsons are still at 45. And why not compare American feminist writers at 681? How many notable Mexican feminist writers are there? Who is capable of writing about them, without serious research? Why are those people not contributing – how come we are (implicitly) blaming the people who are contributing ?

Pop quiz: name as many Mexican feminist writers as you can. Name as many Simpsons characters as you can.

«En esta lista de escritoras feministas mexicanas hay 10 nombres. En la de personajes recurrentes de Los Simpsons hay 152. »

From this article

Same as the above except now we are comparing a category with a list.

"[T]he entry for "memes" is as long as the entry for Immanuel Kant. (Needless to say, there's no entry for Mary Midgley. We could go on, but you get the general idea)."

• Source: Orlowski at The Register. (Way back in 2004 – he also explains that Wikipedians are the only people reading Wikipedia – even then that was patently false.)
• Verdict: False then, and false now.
• Reason: Immanuel Kant at 122k is more than twice the size of Meme at 53k (memes has been a redirect since 2002). Moreover, we have 34 pages in the category Immanuel Kant, not counting 29 pages on Kantianism and 49 pages on Kantian philosophers. Even in July 2004 Immanuel Kant was a longer article, if not by as large a ratio – and significantly many of the subsidiary articles existed. However, for a period of some weeks ending 9 June 2004, when a substantial chunk of text was deleted from the meme article, the meme article (19k prose size, 3,081 words) was indeed longer than the Kant biography (14k prose size, 2,222 words).

"[T]hat there are less Wikipedia articles on women poets than pornographic actresses, a depressing statistic."

• Source: James Gleick, "Wikipedia’s Women Problem", New York Review of Books, attributed to a Wikipedia editor.[1]
• Verdict: False then and false now
• Reason: There are (at the time of writing) 987 female pornographic actresses, compared with 2,828 female poets, according to Catscan.
• Commentary: Like the item below, this fails to take into account female poets who were (only) categorised as poets. Moreover, it was possibly a throw-away remark by the editor in question, maybe half remembering the "porn actresses/chemists" claim.
  • Gleick also makes poorly researched (or poorly expressed) statements like: "A typical hidden category is “Wikipedia:Categories for discussion,” containing thousands of pages of logged discussions about the suitabilities of various categories."
  • It's amusing to see this claim was from NYROB who had their significant problems with systemic bias pointed out by a 2011 study:

"At the New York Review of Books, a whopping 88 percent – or 133 of 152 articles published in 2011 – were written by men. More than 80 percent of the 770 overall pieces published were written by men. (More than three-quarters of the authors reviewed by the publication were male.) In 2010, 85 percent of the articles published by NYROB were written by men, while 84 percent or 306 of 365 authors reviewed were male." Dylan Stableford (1 March 2012). "Voices unheard: Female bylines still lacking in male-dominated literary magazines". Yahoo News.

"However, the claim holds true for American biography subjects: Category:American female pornographic film actors contains 667 biographies, while Category:American women poets and its subcategories contain 416 biographies."

• Source: Collida and Kolbe (29 April 2013) Wikipedia's Culture of Sexism- It's Not Just for Novelists Wikipediocracy
• Verdict: False then and false now.
• Reason: Collida and Kolbe only looked at the categories – in an article covering the dispute about mainstream "female" subcategories – and covering the early stage of populating them, the authors neglected to consider American female poets still (only) categorised in Category:American poets. There are currently 664 American women poets compared with 303 American female pornographic film actors.

"More articles on Lord of the Rings than on Sub-Saharan Africa"
or "As a case in point, there are more articles in the Lord of the Rings category than in the sub-Saharan Africa group."

• Source : BBC here 6 August and repeated by interviewer to Jimmy Wales on the 8th August 2014.
• Verdict: False. Very very false. "The counts may be wrong" (Jimmy Wales 8 August 2014)
• Reason: Look it just is, OK?
• Real reason: At the time of writing there are 703 pages in the LOTR category according to Catscan with subcategories set to a depth of 7. On Category:Sub-Saharan Africa the tool fails with maximum number of objects exceeded even with a depth of 4! With a depth of 3 there are 21,076 articles and 778 categories – i.e. more categories on SSA than articles on LOTR.
• Even more: If you exclude WP:redirects the LOTR list reduces to 191, the SSA to 21,050, outnumbering the LOTR by more than a factor of 100.
• Commentary: KingCantona says it best at Rollonfriday.com "One does not simply write an article about Sub-Saharan Africa".

"[R]ight now, I suspect articles on 21st century porn stars outnumber those on 21st century women writers by a factor of a zillion to one"

• Source: Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Gender_Gap_Task_Force/Evidence – User:Montanabw
• Verdict: False, assuming a "zillion" is greater than 1/8
• Reason: We have 822 members of Category:21st-century women writers and 733 living or recently dead members of Category:20th-century women writers (including 4 levels of sub-cats) – so some 1555 entries – these categories don't tell the whole story, though, taking out duplicates and adding in other women writers who lived past the year 2000 (for example Delia Sherman) and are not in these categories we get 11,620. List of pornographic actresses by decade lists 30 actresses in the 2000s and 18 in the 2010s, giving a total of 48 articles, however this list was eviscerated recently. The entire category Category:Pornographic film actors, including subcategories to a depth of 4 has only 1409 articles about actors (male and female), of whom at most 1353 were alive during the 21st century. Even ignoring the "zillion" and counting male pornographic actors (and not just "stars") we have eight times more 21st century women writers than 21st century porn stars
• Note: Even the sub-sub category Category:21st-century American women journalists now has 945 articles.

"[A]t one point there were articles on every episode of Star Trek, but none of the major cities in Africa." Stephen Harrison.

• Source: Wikipedia says no individual has a monopoly on truth
• Verdict: False.
• Reason: Let's look at the Nostalgia Wiki - frozen on 20 December 2001. Starting with Star Trek there are articles for some of the series (not seasons), but I could find no episode articles, although there is an episode list for the original series, the beginnings of one for "ENT", and an article about tribbles.
  At this time the following African cities had articles:
  1. Algiers
  2. Cairo
  3. Cape Town
  4. Dar es Salaam
  5. Khartoum
  6. Luanda
  7. Lusaka
  8. Nairobi
  9. Soweto
  10. Tripoli

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