I just noticed an interesting story about Wikipedia. The Standard reports that the 2nd-term chair of Wikipedia’s arbitration committee has been forced to resign because they did not bother to check his credentials.
He claimed to have degrees in Theology and Canon Law. Instead he turned out to be a 24-year-old college dropout who has edited 20 000+ Wiki articles and he hid his identity because he was afraid of retribution from people whose articles he had edited.
Wikipedia adminstrators have a growing reputation for making some of the most horrendously stupid and preventable choices when editing content. The Tolkien and Middle-earth section for example is rife with propaganda misinformation and what Wikipedia calls “original research” (something that is in fact supposedly forbidden by their content policies).
When many people who either don’t know the subject matter well or who apply intentionally biased standards of research come together to create a resource they build what is essentially a pack of lies. Wikipedia sections with severe issues in terms of the reliability of their information that I have personally reviewed include Tolkien and Middle-earth search engine optimization and several historical topics.
Legitimate research is complicated by disparate opinions multiple interpretations and a mixture of incomplete or inaccurate “facts”. A resource as widely relied upon as Wikipedia is should be carefully reviewed by people who are legitimately qualified in the subject matter but the Wiki articles have outstripped accreditation by an order of magnituie.
People have written articles about so many topics there simply are not enough qualified experts in the world to fix the epidemic of bias propaganda misinformed opinion and illegitimate research. The irresponsible attitude of the Wikipedia community was literally born of the Internet’s incapacity for intellectual reasoning. People just have no standards there.
For example when I used the expression “Ages of the Sun” in some article contributions for Wikipedia the Wiki community was told that this was “original research” because Tolkien had never used the term in his writings. The implication was that I was trying to insert my own terminology into the Middle-earth articles. In fact the expression comes from David Day (of all people) and it accurately describes Tolkien’s timeline.
But because the label of “original research” was wrongly applied to that expression the Wikiconsensus moved to strike it to from the articles and instead favored misleading and inaccurate information. The section on “Valian Years” for example is wrong on several key points.
In the current version of the Middle-earth cosmology sources that have nothing to do with Middle-earth (such as The Book of Lost Tales) are cited to explain points that also don’t exist in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
In essence the Wikipedia community has concocted a totally fictitious description of Tolkien’s Middle-earth far less accurate and dependable than anything David Day ever wrote.
In Tolkien scholarship the worst insult one could deliver at any point for many years was equivalent to “That sounds like something David Day wrote”. Today the worst insult you can throw at someone would be “You got that from Wikipedia didn’t you?”
What should a Wiki section on Tolkien and Middle-earth consist of? A truly encyclopedic effort would only document the facts of what has been published and derived from Tolkien carefully distinguishing between the mythology for England (as depicted in The Book of Lost Tales) and the mythology for Middle-earth (as depicted in The Hobbit 2nd Edition The Lord of the Rings and related books) and between the documentation Christopher Tolkien provided on how Middle-earth came to be and the Middle-earth cosmology itself.
Which is not to say there isn’t room on the Internet for encyclopedic efforts to document the fictional worlds that Tolkien created but the most well-known such project — The Encyclopedia of Arda — fails to disciriminate between acceptable and unacceptable sources and even so is so overwhelmed by the monumental task of documenting everything possible that to this day many entries remain vague and incomplete (inaccuracies notwithstanding).
For its part the Encyclopedia of Arda has managed to avoid sinking to the levels of David Day and Wikipedia but its incompleteness alone demonstrates the futility of trying to document Middle-earth. There are simply too few people who understand the material well enough to come together to form a communal project worthy of serious attention.
As matters stand now it will take Tolkien fandom years to recover from the damage inflicted by Wikipedia.
I’ve never heard about it. I was thinking that Wikipedia is ok. I feel a little bit confused by your post.