Posted by
Andrews on Tuesday, November 25, 2008 12:51:43 PM
As I have complained before, Wikipedia's
arcane rules of "evidence" produce more absurd rulings than I can count. Wikipedia's strange rules result in the bizarre situation where self-evident statements are dismissed as "original research", while the most outlandish statements are allowed provided there is a citation.
In the current case, I stumbled
across a site whose owner was attempting his own translations of the poetry of Endre Ady. It was interesting reading his commentary on the difficulties of translating Hungarian, especially trying to make the final result resemble in some way the tone and meter of the original.
However, I found myself curious, I had never heard of Endre Ady. Then again, I am not the world's greatest fancier of poetry. I am not a philistine, I have heard most of the big names, I have read quite a bit, written my share when younger, and I am hardly ignorant of poetry, but I had never heard of this specific poet.
Which made the description
in Wikipedia all the more surprising:
He was one of the most important poets not only in the corpus of Hungarian literature but also in world literature.
Which seems a bit of an excessive claim, seeing as his name is not exactly tossed out there with Keats, Longfellow, Wordsworth, Blake, Baudelaire, and the rest.
Under normal circumstances I would have expected some Wiki-editor to say something about "peacock words"* or to tag it as being beneath the standards of Wikipedia. But then I noticed that a little superscript followed this assertion. Yes, it was true. Following the absurd rules of Wikipedia, even this astoundingly excessive statement is perfectly acceptable, as long as you can cite a source.
Then again, the final punchline is even better. Yes, ti is an absurdly excessive claim. And yes it is a riot that Wikipedia allows it just because there is a citation. But what makes it such an exquisite joke, at least for me, is that
the page cited in no way supports the absurd claim. So, the footnote itself is wrong.
I leave it to my reader to draw his own conclusion about the soundness of Wiki-methodology.
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* These wiki types have their own jargon, which includes such bizarre neologisms as "peacock words". I find it distracting when I try to read their disputes in the "talk" pages for some articles, as the wikispeak sometimes makes it sound like I am following a conversation which originally took place in some other language and was only imperfectly translated into English, or else written by the same screen writers who wrote the mock pidgin English for Chinese characters in movies from the 1930's.
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POSTSCRIPT
My old lists of anti-Wikipedia articles always seemed to miss certain articles, so I am presenting here a comprehensive list of such articles:
Stop Confusing Me With The Facts!
Mystery Quotes
Wikipedia?
The Failure of Wikipedia
Opinion Masquerading as Fact
Funny Numbers
What is Wrong with Wikipedia?
Endangered Species
Sterility of Formal Economics
Deceiving Themselves?
A Question About Language
Why People Don't Take Academics Seriously
A Request for Rush Fans
Wikipedia Absurdities
Proof Positive
Some Libertarian Analogies
Hopefully this will help those who want to find my criticisms of Wikipedia.