Remember - a lot of people who do edit Wikipedia know a lot about computers and obscure pop culture references, including myself, so unless other people come in and edit, it’s going to be skewed. That’s the great thing - you don’t like it? Edit it!

When I write articles, I’ve been told by my editors to not use Wikipedia as a source. I sometimes use Wiki when I need to find citations all in one place, but I know that Wiki has some serious problems. I use it to find other resources, but I don’t use it as a source itself.

For example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_comic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape:_Torment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Way_for_Ducklings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_chicken_processing_plant_fire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer%27s_Phobia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_general_relativity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Labour_Party_%28Trinidad_and_Tobago%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-4_Phantom_II

Wikipedia’s wide range can sometimes make it the only readily available source on obscure topics, even if it has problems with accuracy at times. Are you likely to find a more authoritative source on the history of sprite comics than Wikipedia?

As for providing quotes from living people, the interviews would simply need to be documented elsewhere on the Internet in order to avoid being considered original research. That isn’t particularly difficult to do — all you’d need would be a microphone.

The error was pointed out on the talk page in 2006, and still hasn’t been fixed.

Well, somebody finally did fix it.

::shrugs::

The beauty of its democracy is that not only are you free to copy the ideas and structures for WikiLeftyPedia, but they’ll even fork their content and give you all their code. And if a significant fraction of the “open source history” community decides that your approach is superior, or even that it is of value in its own unique way, they’ll participate and make the project a success.

I suspect, though, that most of those people, even (or perhaps especially) in the definitely liberal-leaning Wiki crowd, find more stimulation in the crosstalk and debate of the marketplace of ideas than they would in an echo chamber, which any ideologically specific site would seem inevitably fated to become.

If they just let unverified oral claims come on, it’d be far less reliable than it already is.

There’s nothing stopping you from gathering the quotes, writing the history out and attempting to publish it. You may have to self publish. But the internet has made that much less costly than it used to be.

There are plenty of people in all kinds of disciplines whose names end in “Studies” researching the sort of cultural history you’d like to see. Once their work appears in a verifiable source (peer-reviewed journal, monograph, etc.), then any Wikipedian is more than free to cite it. The problem with Original Research in a venue like Wikipedia is that it’s a platform for any crank with an ethernet cable an an axe to grind to peddle his/her ideas. Even communists and/or Butlerites needs some sort of methodological guideposts. Of all of Wikipedia’s weaknesses, NPOV is not one of them.

Wikipedia’s weakness is again the problem that (as I just mentioned) it’s wide open to anyone with an ethernet cable and an axe to grind. So, for example, the last time I checked the article on the Pit Bull, I read all about a lovable completely safe animal that is unfairly maligned in the media. The article on Cannabis talks about all of the wonderful qualities of THC. There are other examples, but those are the two that I have come across fairly recently.