User:Student7/Sandbox 21

Article quality

Wikipedia has some amazing editors who have produced some incredible articles. But if the encyclopedia should fail, as do all human institutions, it will be because of articles like these:

• Dropping out - includes a list of people who have dropped out of college and doctoral programs. I expect that they will one day add Nixon, who "dropped out" of the presidency! This is one of the worst examples I have seen of Wikipedia trying to be a dictionary despite WP:NOTDICTIONARY. It is a WP:COATRACK excuse to list a bunch of people who went on to become notable, and totally ignoring the fact that huge numbers of high school dropouts wind up in prison or worse. They don't become notable, so not on anyone's list. Various editors have changed this into a better, more encyclopedic article.
• Rivian Automotive - a company employing 25 people. Try to imagine an encyclopedia full of companies 25 people and up? There are perhaps tens of millions of these. There are only a few hundred thousand editors, at most. How can we follow/watch all these articles?

And, yes, I tried Afd-ing them. Reviewers claimed that these were all "vital" to the encyclopedia.

• Catholic_Church_in_the_United_States#Top_eight_Catholic_pilgrimage_destinations_in_the_United_States

contains sites that a committee of bishops apparently sat down and decided to "promote." In other words, religious WP:SPAM. They are not sites that people necessarily actually visit!

• Ave Maria University - Highjacked by anti-founder, pov pushers.
• Venezuela. It is unsurprising that an editor cannot make a referenced change to the leader of a country, like Hugo Chávez. Most glorious leaders of any nation, including democratic ones, are fiercely protected. In Chavez' case, it means that his strange comments, recorded and repeated by him, in favor of Carlos the Jackal, Idi Amin, and other crazies of the era, cannot be inserted. A bit worse, it is nearly impossible to put anything in Venezuelan articles at all unless they meet some very strange criteria. For example, no references from the New York Times, nor the Washington Post are allowed, because they are printed in the United States which is an "enemy" of Venezuela and furthermore these papers are running dogs of US Imperialism. A surprise, doubtless to their many readers and critics!

There appears to be a complete claque, top to bottom, of admins, paid Wikipedia editors, volunteer "responders to requests for comment", etc. that are all on the same sheet. You can find the "truth" about North Korea or Iran, pretty much, but not Venezuela!

It was disappointing. I hate to say it since it sounds like sour grapes, but except for a small amount of oil, no one really cares about Venezuela anyway. The US government's attitude is to ignore Chavez. Best for me, as well!

• Genocides in history - highjacked by WP:OWNERs. Wikibullies[1]. WP:DONTBITE (the newbies) See User_talk:88.104.219.76, and [2] who was driven off. I was able to rm a quote by Hugo Chavez, portrayed as an expert on American genocide!

• History of the Jews in Haiti. Bottom line: there are 25 Jews in Haiti. There have seldom been many more. They have not really done anything notable over the centuries. Clearly WP:TRIVIA, but has sufficient support from a claque.

Category quality

Wikipedia will not fail because of poor categorization. Realizing this, many editors have ignored categorization and allow sloppy categories. For example:

The CSX 8888 incident is a very interesting railway incident which inspired a 2010 film. It is wrongly categorized under Category:Railway accidents in the United States, which it clearly was not. Nothing happened except a lot of people were frightened. The National Transportation Board (and Wikipedia) correctly label the article as an "incident." It is wrongly categorized. But that's not all!

The category on accidents wrongly rolls up into a worse category of Category:Transportation disasters in the United States. Since "nothing" happened, it was clearly not a disaster!

This is not a trivial problem. I tried correcting it under several dozens categories (involves years, places, etc.). These were all reverted by Transport weenies who were alarmed at having to change, literally, thousands of categories, all of them exaggerated in the same manner!

POV

• In a few cases, there is irrelevant material to otherwise high quality articles. Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant and other nuclear plants after the Fukushima incident of 2011. The failure of Fukushima, BTW, had nothing to do with the reactor design, per se. It failed 1) because it was subjected to an earthquake well above the design parameters. 2) the cooler backup was swamped by the tsunami which was higher than expected. The design did what is was supposed to do. People miscalculated the max earthquake and max tsunami.

• Catholic articles on sexual abuse have been properly reported. Clergy (not just Catholic priests) represent about 4% of all abuse in the US. There are hundreds, if not thousands of articles on Catholic clergy abuse.

Another 15-16% goes largely unreported because it is by teachers, a huge number, exposed to a huge number of students for 30 hours each week. The abuse is heterosexual, mostly. Teachers unions are aggressive in defending the teachers accused (and on Wikipedia, BTW!). Few wind up with prison sentences. Kids refuse to testify or the prosecutor determines they would make poor witnesses. Many teachers "cop a plea" and go on to teach elsewhere (normally their principal refuses to take them back!). So there are almost no articles on teacher abuse in the same detail there is for Catholics, except for 4 women who were caught during a slow news day, abusing male students a number of years back. When the media (and maybe the public) realized that this was not all that uncommon (probably one per school district every ten years - there are thousands of school districts), it quit reporting them. Meanwhile, Wikipedia still retains these original "infamous four" who deserved their punishment, but were IMO singled out for inordinate publicity on a permanent basis.

80% of the abuse is in the home. This is not reportable in the usual fashion. Court records are often closed. Seldom winds up in the media. Might be one or two articles.