I need a word for this
I love wikipedia. I enjoy reading an article, and then reading other articles that relate to it. Tonight I watched The Foot Fist Way, a very funny movie about a Taekwondo instructor. I didn’t know anything about Taekwondo, so I looked it up on wikipedia. Somehow, I ended the night reading about sexual slavery as practiced by the Japanese during the first part of the 20th century.
But I’m not here to talk about the boring ways in which I spend my free time. There is a tendency, in wikipedia articles, to be less and less accurate when the topic of the article is less and less general. For example, during my reading adventure tonight, I was reading about breaking in regards to martial arts demonstrations. At a point, the article starts to make questionable statements:
People often talk about a “domino effect” that only exists in the mind, which was proven scientifically.
In most other wikipedia articles, it would probably look like this:
People [who?] often talk about a “domino effect” that only exists in the mind, which was proven scientifically. [citation needed]
This amuses me. I know I’m pretty much done reading wikipedia for the night when I start to encounter these.
I have a theory for why this phenomenon exists. I read a lot of articles tonight about Japanese warcrimes during the 20th century. Those had plenty of sources and were very clearly written. I think many people are interested in these topics. They are historically significant.
But breaking boards and bricks for martial arts demonstrations is, to say the very least, less significant. I imagine that far fewer people read the board breaking article than read the warcrimes article. And the people that are reading the board breaking articles have no problem with claims of dubious quality. I’ve seen this whenever I come across an article that seems to have little possibility for general interest. Articles about anime, musical genres that I’ve never heard of, and fanboy-inspiring topics in general.
It’s really easy to imagine the guy from The Foot Fist Way reading and possibly contributing to the article on board breaking. In fact, I can’t imagine anyone else reading it, really.
I want to come up with a word for this drop in quality. It is the point at which wikipedia stops being useful and simply elicits a chorus of “yep, that’s pretty much how it is.” And it will never get any better for these kinds of articles because nobody who knows anything about writing or truth will ever read them.

