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.

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