User:Rursus/Wikipedia idiosyncratic conceptions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My list of probable Wikipedian fantasy — "nobody but Wikipedia claim this stuff":

  • Medieval Restorationism alleges a "restorationist movement" in the medieval times, invoking the name of Barbara W. Tuchman as a "proof", the article was dumped off from the pretty confused article Restorationism, probable as a cleansing act;
  • Hyper-Calvinism alleges a Hyper-Calvinist doctrine, while the "term" is in reality a derrogative invective against malinterpreted Calvinism, the true definition is instead to be found here;

The mechanisms promoting this kind of desinformative trash, are:

  • too much editor respect towards even very badly written stuff — it would be better to remove-and-stub the worst texts more often than it is done today, perhaps voting the offending text to oblivion by a community thumb-down;
  • people edit without having the necessary knowledge, using selected sources that might be interpreted in a certain direction, to make a picture — the mechanism here is not dishonesty, but an immature mode of thinking;
  • anon-IP abusers use Wikipedia to promote their own propaganda, registered editors either don't know enough to argue against the abuses, or don't want to take the effort of straighting facts up because of the complexity of falsities intertwined with falsities;
  • people rely too much in unreliable Wikipedia texts and start to presume their statements to be true without reflection (I on the other hand is becoming more and more sceptic);
  • there are also some possible flaws in the English language that makes persons believe that suffiently often repeated nominal phrases are actually terms – I'm a Swede and Swedish handle word compositions in a more systematic way than English, so the characteristic noun phrase to term malconceptions are mostly avoided by the language forcing a word composition for terms but avoiding them for noun phrases without terminological meaning;