Tom spurgeon grouses about Wikipedia:
* from the department of largely unfair comparisons one: word count of wikipedia entry for minor X-Men character Doug Ramsey = 4063; word count of wikipedia entry for surpassing underground and alt-comics talent Kim Deitch = 1082.
It’s unfair because it falls into the lipstick fallacy: if only we spent as much on space as we did on lipstick, we’d be on Mars right now — not just our robots.
But it’s also unfair because it doesn’t take into account how Wikipedia works and why it’s easier to write about Doug Ramsey than it is to write about Kim Deitch. First, with a fictional character you don’t have the handicap of having to write under Wikipedia’s stringent rules about biographies of living persons where you have to double and triple check your sources and quotes before it can be included. Wikipedia has burned its fingers a couple of times with having dumb or malicious edits getting media coverage. In comics for example, there was the whole John Byrne kerfluffle. Second, it’s often much easier to source facts for fictional characters too: just summarise the comics themselves or fanpages about them.
Writing a good article about an important, but slightly obscure figure like Deitch is much more difficult. Less sources online, fewer facts you can just regurgitate, more room to fall foul to Wikipedia’s ever increasing body of rules. I’ve started a fair few comics subjects myself when I was still active there, but it can be very hard to do more than a skeleton outline, where you list the biographical basics, the various publications and such. Anything else –art style, critical impact and so on — is difficult to do on Wikipedia and not get challenged on it. There comes a point where it’s just easier to work on it for your own site or publication elsewhere than Wikipedia.
(Course, it doesn’t help that the sort of geeks who read X-Men are much more present on Wikipedia than the sort of geeks who are into underground comix)
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