Wikipedia:Wikipedia has more...: Difference between revisions

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{{Essay|WP:HASMORE}}

A look at some of the [[snowclone]]s of "Wikipedia has more information on PokemonPokémon than on the Bible".

The metric 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.

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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 itWikipedia 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.

==Wikipedia has more information on Pokemon''Pokémon'' than on the Bible.==

* Source: Common meme

* Verdict: Not true.

* Reason: While at the time of writing there are 376 articles in the category ''[[:Category:Pokémon|Pokémon]]'' (now {{PAGESINCATEGORY:Pokémon}}), there are 1872 just on biblical manuscripts and 1211 on biblical scholars.

==Wikipedia has more articles on porn stars than on chemists==

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* 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.

==Wikipedia has four pages on [[Megatron]] and only one on [[Dylan Thomas]].==

* 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.

==Wikipedia has more information on thousands of pornstars than it does on the Basque Country==

* 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 [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Basque|WikiProject Basque]].

==Wikipedia has more information on [[Britney Spears]] than [[Socrates]].==

* Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:B2B 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]].

==Wikipedia has more articles on [[:Category:The Simpsons]] characters|''The Simpsons'' characters]] than on [[:Category:Mexican feminist writers|Mexican feminist authors]].==

* Source: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/business/media/31link.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1402278002-VnQc7BHJc54ytGL3s4L2SA ''The New York Times'']

* Verdict: TrueApparently (buttrue becomingat lessthe sotime (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''The Simpsons”Simpsons''? "{{Break}}

Note the MFW's now number {{PAGESINCATEGORY|Mexican feminist writers}}, while the Simps are still at 45. And why not compare American feminist writers at {{PAGESINCATEGORY|American feminist writers}}. 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 blaming the people who ''are contributing''?

Note the MFW's now number {{PAGESINCATEGORY|:Mexican feminist writers}}, while the SimpsSimpsons are still at 45. And why not compare American feminist writers at {{PAGESINCATEGORY|:American feminist writers}}.? 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.

===Redux===

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

[http://www.elconfidencial.com/tecnologia/2014-09-02/por-que-las-mujeres-no-escriben-en-la-wikipedia_184092/ From this article]

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

==AsWikipedia has as much on "memes" as "Immanuel Kant".==

"[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: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/23/wiki_fiddlers_big_book/ 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meme&oldid=3999843 meme article] (19k prose size, 3,081 words) was indeed longer than the [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Immanuel_Kant&oldid=4088905 Kant biography] (14k prose size, 2,222 words).

==MoreWikipedia has more articles on female porn actresses than female poets.==

"[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 booksBooks'', attributed to a Wikipedia editor.[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2013_April_24&diff=prev&oldid=552203555]

* 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 [http://tools.wmflabs.org/catscan2/catscan2.php 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 [http://www.vidaweb.org/new-york-review-of-books-2011-count/ study]:

{{quote|"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." {{Cite journal|title=Voices unheard: Female bylines still lacking in male-dominated literary magazines|author=Dylan Stableford|work= Yahoo News|date=1 March 2012}}

}}

==MoreWikipedia has more articles on American female porn actresses than American female poets.==

"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) [http://wikipediocracy.com/2013/04/29/wikipedias-culture-of-sexism-its-not-just-for-novelists/ 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 {{PAGESINCATEGORY|:American women poets}} American women poets compared with {{PAGESINCATEGORY|:American female pornographic film actorsactresses}} American female pornographic film actors.

==More articles on ''Lord of the Rings'' than on Sub-Saharan Africa.==

"More articles on ''Lord of the Rings'' than on Sub-Saharan Africa"{{Break}}

or

"As a case in point, there are more articles in the Lord of the Rings category than in the sub-Saharan Africa group."{{Break}}

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* 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 articlespages in the LOTR category according to Catscan with subcategories set to a depth of 7. On [[:Category:Sub-Saharan Africa]] the tool ''fails'' with <code>maximum number of objects exceeded</code> even with a depth of 4! With a depth of 3 there are 21,076 articles and 778 categories -&nbsp;– i.e. more ''categories'' on SSA thenthan ''articles'' on LOTR.

* Even more: If you exclude [[WP:redirect]]s the LOTR list reduces to 191, the SSA to 21,050, outnumbering the LOTR by more than a factor of 100.

* CommentryCommentary: KingCantona says it best at [http://www.rollonfriday.com/Discussion/MainDiscussion/tabid/79/Id/10382711/currentPage/0/Default.aspx Rollonfriday.com] "[[One does not simply walk into Mordor|One does not simply]] write an article about Sub-Saharan Africa".

==AWikipedia has a zillion times more articles on 21st century porn stars than on 21st century women writers.==

"[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" {{Break}}

* Source: [[Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Gender_Gap_Task_Force/Evidence]] -&nbsp;– [[User:Montanabw]]

* Verdict: False., Evenassuming if we ignore thea "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) -&nbsp;– so some 1555 entries -&nbsp;– 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 2000's2000s 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

==At one point there were articles on '''every''' episode of Star Trek, but '''none''' of the major cities in Africa==

"[A]t one point there were articles on '''every''' episode of Star Trek, but '''none''' of the major cities in Africa." Stephen Harrison.

* Source: [https://linksiwouldgchatyou.substack.com/p/wikipedia-says-no-individual-has 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 [https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek/tribble tribbles].{{Break}}At this time the following African cities had articles:

*# Algiers

*# Cairo

*# Cape Town

*# Dar es Salaam

*# Khartoum

*# Luanda

*# Lusaka

*# Nairobi

*# Soweto

*# Tripoli

==See also==