Artist's Statement

Hannah Kane
Writing Assignment #2
Artist’s Statement
Film and Literature
17 Nov. 2010

The piece of writing that follows may or may not be an essay. It was posted in its raw, original form at one of my blogs, before I copied and pasted it into a Microsoft Word document, tweaked the formatting somewhat, and generally attempted to make it presentable. My aim in doing this was to give my writing a sense of temporality, of grounding in time, of trajectory – perhaps even narrative trajectory. This also serves to underscore the self-reflectivity and reflexivity of my piece; essentially, it became an online account of a personal history, created entirely using a personal computer: my HP Pavilion Entertainment PC. As I wrote and researched and posted to the blog, I saw a cyclical pattern and made note of it in my text: that sometimes, during Google searches for information, I would come across my own blog.
One thing that stands out about this essay is the amount of quoting. Especially in the section about Wikipedia, I wanted to get user-generated descriptions of the online phenomena I discussed. I feel that my choice of material cited – almost entirely Wikipedia – is a valid choice stylistically and serves to underscore my main point(s?). By preserving the source formatting, I hope to give the sense that the person reading my essay is actually reading Wikipedia, but necessarily not actual Wikipedia. What appears in the following essay is Wikipedia as it appeared when I did my research, as unadulterated as I could make it, so that the reader is equipped with the same knowledge I had when I wrote my commentary. Because it is constantly edited, Wikipedia is subject to near-perpetual change; what the reader of my essay might see if I merely referred them to the pages I visited, they might come into my discussion with different source material.
But now, I feel I must return to the question of whether this work is an essay. In the sense of the French word essai, from which our English word derives, I have most certainly written an essay – an attempt. On a deeper level, too, the essayistic traits of this work manifest themselves. In class, we came up with four primary qualities that define the essay. First, essays tend to discuss small or localized topics. This allows the essayist to move between the specific and the general. The topic I was assigned, computers, was a fairly broad topic; I had to narrow it down to personal computers, which are (obviously) narrower. I also incorporate history, couching my discussion in terms of both personal history and global history. Because of this, I necessarily had to move between the specific and the general. Secondly, our class decided that an essay must be refracted from the point of view of the essayist – be they writer, filmmaker, or creator in some other medium – but essays are not about the essayist. We also discussed the rhetorical trajectory of the essay, and agreed that essays allow for contradiction, open-endedness, and the reader’s own ideas and thoughts. Further, we defined the essay as a free-form patchwork of varied textual sources. I think this piece clearly meets these criteria.
Trickier, perhaps, is our concept of the essayist as analytical outsider. This status allows for cheek, irony, maybe even melancholy. Am I an outsider here? I can’t quite tell. I do, I suppose, champion a point of view that I have not seen discussed elsewhere, a point of view which I would be willing to bet is, in fact, extremely unpopular. Come to think of it, I dispute the notion that Wikipedia is worthless and unreliable – that is certainly an outsider position. Whether I come across as cheeky, ironic, or melancholy, I do not think I am, at this point, self-aware enough to determine.
Finally, this piece has taken on an online life of its own. As previously mentioned, this essay was posted in its original form as a series of posts at http://talkingstove.blogspot.com/. During winter break, I hope to produce – using only my PC – at least one video, to be posted to my YouTube account, related to this topic. If nothing else, though, this project will live on in this consolidated, written form, as I intend to keep expanding on it, and make it long enough to function as my contribution to National Novel Writing Month. Thus, parts of this piece will survive in snippets at http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/559112, if nowhere else.
In sum, I firmly believe that the following piece falls within the realm of the essay. I worry that I ramble on too long, or that my point is not clear enough; however, both of these qualities cement this work inside the field of the essayistic. Also of concern, to my line of thinking, is the amount of quoting and citation included in the ensuing text. In addition to citing the internet – in terms of both independent websites and Wikipedia proper – I quote two of my favorite books written by two of my favorite authors: Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. I also include a quote about the nature of history, which I found on Wikipedia. I almost feel immoral doing this, but the form allows it, and I am trying as hard as I can to make sure credit is given where it is due.
One last note: in class, we touched on the notion that one of the most important practices, one of the fundamental rules of writing, is that the writer should keep his or her audience firmly in mind. My audience is the internet, the public in general – the readers of my blog; but also, this is for my dad, for my siblings, for my friend Fernando, whose inquiries into the life of his grandmother inspired me to contemplate the mysteries of my grandfather’s time on Earth.
Without further ado, I hope you, the reader, enjoy my essay.

Conclusion

I feel that the fact that you just put up with such a warped, lengthy meandering rumination on personal computers and history means that you deserve something short, sweet, and frank – a sort of bucket of ice water to wake you up from my dizzying mental journey.

Thus, to conclude: I think widespread access to personal computers has changed how people (granted, predominantly first-world people, but again, a topic for a different essay) conceptualize history. History has long been written by the elite, by the powerful, by the winners. Personal computers provide easy, widespread access to the internet, which includes sites with strong emphasis on user-generated content – in essence, user-generated personal histories. For the sake of brevity (that’s not quite a joke, but I do realize this essay is creeping up in fifty pages), I’ve tried to focus on Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter, but I hope other, smaller sites like DeviantArt, YouTube, Wordpress, Blogger, webs.com, and their ilk don’t go unexamined. I feel I’ve made a pretty decent case that people who have grown up establishing an online presence have left self-generated records of themselves, their experiences, and their perspectives on larger, “historical” events.

However, I want to bring home my initial guiding principle in exploring online histories – my personal search for my long-dead grandfather. The minutiae of his existence (which could, today, come from Facebook, Twitter, and the like) are almost entirely lost. For the internet, James Richard Kane (or is his name Richard James Kane? Dick Kane? Who was he?) exists almost entirely in terms of his service in World War Two.

What was that, exactly? Unless you’ve done reading outside this essay, you don’t know, and I’ve deliberately kept myself in the dark up to this point, so that if you’ve been sticking to my perspective, we’ll find out together (in a sense). I do a quick search of http://www.69th-infantry-division.com/combat/combat.html - a page off a site I linked previously – for my grandfather’s regiment, the 273rd.

Now, a moment of suspense for you, though a much longer moment of suspense for me, as I have to interrupt my research and concurrent writing to attend a screening for class. I have the combat narrative open in the other window, and it’s killing me that I have to go to class (since this essay is for the same class, though, I feel the need to point out that the screening is also interesting, just a half-hour walk away and through the rain).

The 273rd Infantry crossed what the website calls “the infamous Siegfried Line” taking artillery fire from the Germans, and later crossed the Rhine. “On April 16,” the site says, “the 273rd Infantry captured the town of Colditz and liberated Colditz Castle, freeing many Allied prisoners.” During the battle for Leipzig, the 273rd fought to the south of the city, which eventually fell to the Allied forces. Only nine days later, “on the afternoon of 25 April 1945, a patrol of 11 men led by Lt. Albert L. Kotzebue of the 273rd Infantry Regiment made the historic contact at Leckwitz on the Elbe River with the 58th Guard Division, 34th Corps, General Jadov's 5th Ukrainian Army, Marshal Koniev's First Ukrainian Front.” This contact is “historic” because it was the first meeting between American and Russian troops during the Second World War; the internet reaches a fairly strong consensus that this was a turning point in the war. If all the information you and I have seen to this point is correct, my grandfather, Richard Kane, was there.

I could get into “aura” and “affect” and Walter Benjamin here, but I don’t want to. The internet is only one way I have access to my grandfather in the present, and I hope it is not the sole avenue by which the future can access me.

[here I will have two photos, accessed on Facebook, one of my cousin, one of my brother and father, all of whom look like my grandpa.]

Twitter Timeline

I feel that, if the reader has thus far followed my admittedly rambling, stumbling (strumbling? strambling?) conceptualization of how the internet and personal computers combine to create a record of history more detailed and personal than at any point in the past, and the reader is also familiar with Twitter, everything I’m about to say on the subject should be pretty self-evident. I’ve touched on Twitter a bit previously, so I don’t think it needs any detailed analysis. But in case you’re unfamiliar (arguably a mercy for you), I’ll take you through it anyway, much as I just did with Facebook.

For perhaps the last time, Wikipedia:
“Twitter is a website which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read other users' messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their friends list. Users may subscribe to other users' tweets—this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers. All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as for smartphones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries. While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees. Since its creation in 2006, Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and currently has more than 175 million users. Quantcast estimates Twitter has 54 million monthly unique U.S. visitors.”

Twitter is smaller than Facebook, it’s true, but – even within its 140-character limit – it can allow for even more freedom of expression and personal definition. If you have a thought that’s longer than 140 characters, you have the option to post more than one tweet at a time, or to use an external Twitter client. Services such as TwitLonger allow Twitter users to post as many characters as they want; when they hit the enter key, TwitLonger posts the first several characters to the user’s account, with a link to the rest of the text.

It is also exceedingly easy to use Twitter to link other users to your blog or photos. My Twitter account is linked to my DeviantArt, my Tumblr, even the blog where I’ve been posting updates about this essay. Many people link Facebook and Twitter, so that their tweets show up as status updates on Facebook. (I personally opt against this because my mom is my friend on Facebook but has, happily, forgotten her Twitter password.)

When California voters upheld Proposition 8, Twitter exploded. It seemed like everyone I followed had something to say on the subject. People were tweeting and retweeting. In real time, I watched events unfold. I got links to opinions, not just those of my followers but those of bloggers and prominent members of the LGBT community literally as soon as they were available online. Most interestingly to me, I was shown links to videos, both recorded and uploaded – and streaming, live. Sitting in my parents’ living room in Manchester, Iowa, I could use my personal computer to watch as clergy, peacefully protesting the decision, did nothing to resist as their wrists were zip-tied together, as they and their compatriots were escorted into police cars and driven away. My thoughts on Prop 8 could constitute an entirely different essay, but the point here is that Twitter allowed me to see and share in a historic event, as it occurred in real time, that took place thousands of miles from where I physically was.

I currently have no way of knowing statistics for the average Twitter user, but studies are being done all the time with Twitter user data (especially since it’s largely public). Sites like tweetstats.com can measure various stats for specific users. Out of curiosity, I checked my own user stats, which I could share with my Twitter followers with a simple click of the mouse:

TweetStats for sebhar (Tweet This!)
Last updated 15 Nov 2010 at 17:49
Your Tweet Timeline - 33.4 tweets per day (tpd) / 728 tweets per month (tpm)

(If you’re curious, more detailed graphs with even more specific stats about my Twitter use can be found, as my Twitter followers were informed, here: http://tweetstats.com/graphs/sebhar)

I’m probably a more active Twitter user than most, but even taking that fact into consideration, imagine the sheer volume of information Twitter generates and later stores, personal histories – not just verbal, but in the form of links to preferred websites, retweets from favored users, photos and videos generated by the user themselves or shared from other users – formulated in small pieces over long periods of time.

What’s more, as I’ve mentioned before, the Library of Congress archives tweets. The links may no longer work, but fifty years from now – the same distance of time between myself and my grandfather – curious youth will know exactly what happened, in what order, at what time, in what we consider the present.

Facebook

Facebook users should be fairly well-acquainted with how they use the website, but I feel a brief statement on the site, its functions, and its use is necessary to flesh out this essay.

To draw once more upon my favorite source, Wikipedia:

“Facebook is a social network service and website. As of July 2010 Facebook has more than 500 million active users, which is about one person for every fourteen in the world. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages. Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, or college, or other characteristics. A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users. Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" Quantcast estimates Facebook has 135.1 million monthly unique U.S. visitors.”

I shape my personal history with Facebook. I post status updates with how I’m feeling, what I’m doing, what’s going on in my life. I state, using Facebook, that I am attending a certain event. I go to that event, take pictures of myself and my friends there, then later post those pictures on Facebook. (I admit, I even go so far as to alter these pictures. Sometimes this is limited to cropping incriminating items – bongs, beer cans – out of the pictures, in order to protect reputations; other times, in terms of this essay, I figure my progeny won’t need to know every detail about my acne, so I photoshop it out.)

My friends do the same. Their posts show up, refreshed in a real-time “news feed” on my Facebook homepage. Wall posts, event RSVPs, what people like, notes people write, games people play, their high scores – I see all this as a constant affirmation that we, people, humans, Facebook users, exist.

“We are writing… we are writing… we are writing…”

How one uses Facebook to communicate is, however, extremely limited to Facebook’s own rules, functions, and capacities. One can click a button to show that one “likes” something, but this is the only option – there’s no “dislike” button, no “disagrees with” button (oh how many times I have wished I could state, with a mere click of my mouse, “Hannah Kane doesn’t give a shit about this”). If I want to write a status and make sure my friends see it, I can tag them: “Hannah Kane went to class with @Ash Bruxvoort today.” But only six tags are allowed in a post. Why six? Six seems like such an arbitrary number.

When I post photos, I can tag people in them; my Facebook friends (though admittedly not all 1,011 of them) can click through and see all 1,182 photos that have ever been tagged of me. If someone tags me in a photo and I don’t want that tag to exist, I can remove it – once again, with one simple click – and I can’t be re-tagged without my consent.

In ways like these, I and 500 million other people cultivate public histories viewable to at least a segment of the rest of the internet-using population.

What Is Wikipedia?

Sorry the formatting is wonky on this. If I have time I'll fix it later.

An appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

I got a lot of funny looks ten years ago when I started talking to people about Wikipedia.

Let’s just say some people were skeptical of the notion that volunteers from all across the world could come together to create a remarkable pool of human knowledge – all for the simple purpose of sharing.

No ads. No agenda. No strings attached.

A decade after its founding, nearly 400 million people use Wikipedia and its sister sites every month - almost a third of the Internet-connected world.
It is the 5th most popular website in the world but Wikipedia isn’t anything like a commercial website. It is a community creation, written by volunteers making one entry at a time. You are part of our community. And I’m writing today to ask you to protect and sustain Wikipedia.
Together, we can keep it free of charge and free of advertising. We can keep it open – you can use the information in Wikipedia any way you want. We can keep it growing – spreading knowledge everywhere, and inviting participation from everyone.
Each year at this time, we reach out to ask you and others all across the Wikimedia community to help sustain our joint enterprise with a modest donation of $20, $35, $50 or more.
If you value Wikipedia as a source of information – and a source of inspiration – I hope you’ll choose to act right now.
All the best,
Jimmy Wales
Founder, Wikipedia
P.S. Wikipedia is about the power of people like us to do extraordinary things. People like us write Wikipedia, one word at a time. People like us fund it, one donation at a time. It's proof of our collective potential to change the world.

* * *

“Wikipedia is a project to build free encyclopedias in all languages of the world. Virtually anyone with Internet access is free to contribute, by contributing neutral, cited information.
Wikipedia started in January 2001, and currently offers more than ten million articles in 273 languages. The largest Wikipedia is in English, with more than three million articles; it is followed by the German, French, Polish and Japanese editions, each of which contain more than half a million articles. Thirty other language editions contain 100,000+ articles, and more than 150 other languages contain 1,000+ articles.
Wikipedia is also known for its community. In 2004 Wikipedia won the Webby Award for "Community" and the Prix Ars Electronica's Golden Nica for "Digital Communities". Since the start of the project, over 650,000 registered users have made at least ten edits. The total number of accounts created on the English Wikipedia alone exceeds 10 million. However, most edits on that language edition come from a few thousand of the most dedicated users.
Some Wikipedias release or plan to release regular snapshots. The German Wikipedia is released twice a year as a DVD, in collaboration with Directmedia Publishing, and the Polish Wikipedia has released one DVD of content.”
* * *
Wikipedia: About
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A general introduction for visitors to Wikipedia. The project also has an encyclopedia article about itself: Wikipedia, and some introductions for aspiring contributors.
Wikipedia (pronounced /ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdi.ə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model. The name "Wikipedia" is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.
Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles (except in certain cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism). Users can contribute anonymously, under a pseudonym, or with their real identity, if they choose.
The fundamental principles by which Wikipedia operates are the Five pillars. The Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines to improve the encyclopedia; however, it is not a formal requirement to be familiar with them before contributing.
Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference websites, attracting nearly 78 million visitors monthly as of January 2010. There are more than 91,000 active contributors working on more than 16,000,000 articles in more than 270 languages. As of today, there are 3,472,030 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia. (See also: Wikipedia:Statistics.)
People of all ages, cultures and backgrounds can add or edit article prose, references, images and other media here. What is contributed is more important than the expertise or qualifications of the contributor. What will remain depends upon whether it fits within Wikipedia's policies, including being verifiable against a published reliable source, so excluding editors' opinions and beliefs and unreviewed research, and is free of copyright restrictions and contentious material about living people. Contributions cannot damage Wikipedia because the software allows easy reversal of mistakes and many experienced editors are watching to help and ensure that edits are cumulative improvements. Begin by simply clicking the edit link at the top of any editable page!
Wikipedia is a live collaboration differing from paper-based reference sources in important ways. Unlike printed encyclopedias, Wikipedia is continually created and updated, with articles on historic events appearing within minutes, rather than months or years. Older articles tend to grow more comprehensive and balanced; newer articles may contain misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Awareness of this aids obtaining valid information and avoiding recently added misinformation (see Researching with Wikipedia).
English Wikipedia right now

Wikipedia is running MediaWiki version 1.16wmf4 (r76511).


It has 3,472,030 articles, and 22,159,421 pages in total.

There have been 425,551,463 edits.

There are 854,603 uploaded files.

There are 13,397,442 registered users,
including 1,764 administrators.


This information is correct as of 20:19 (UTC) on November 12, 2010.
Update


* * *
Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For Wikipedia's non-encyclopedic visitor introduction, see Wikipedia:About.
Wikipedia is a free,[3] web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 16 million articles (over 3.4 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.[4] Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger[5] and is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,[2][6][7][8] ranking seventh among all websites on Alexa.[9]
The name Wikipedia (pronounced /ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) was coined by Larry Sanger[10] and is a portmanteau from wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.
Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view, critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture),[11] and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial processes.[12] Itsreliability and accuracy are also targeted.[13] Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information,[14] though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived,[15][16] and an investigation in Nature found that the material they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."[17]
Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of the encyclopedia building mode and the large presence of unacademic content have been noted several times. When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of several examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube, MySpace, andFacebook.[18] Some noted the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.[19][20] Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.[21]



The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphsfrom many different writing systems
Screenshot [show]

URL
Wikipedia.org

Slogan
The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Commercial? No
Type of site Internet encyclopedia project

Registration Optional (required only for certain tasks such as editing protected pages, creating new article pages or uploading files)
Available language(s)
240 active editions (272 in total)
Content license Creative Commons Attribution/
Share-Alike 3.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL)
Media licensing varies
Owner Wikimedia Foundation (non-profit)

Created by Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[1]

Launched January 15, 2001 (9 years ago)
Alexa rank
7 (July 2010)[2]

Current status Active
* * *
Wikipedia: Five pillars
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Wikipedia:5P)
The fundamental principles by which Wikipedia operates are summarized in the form of five "pillars":
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. It incorporates elements of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, anadvertising platform, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, or a web directory. It is not a dictionary,newspaper, or a collection of source documents; that kind of content should be contributed instead to the Wikimedia sister projects.


Wikipedia has a neutral point of view. We strive for articles that advocate no single point of view. Sometimes this requires representing multiple points of view, presenting each point of view accurately and in context, and not presenting any point of view as "the truth" or "the best view". All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy: unreferenced material may be removed, so please provide references. Editors' personal experiences, interpretations, or opinions do not belong here. That means citingverifiable, authoritative sources, especially on controversial topics and when the subject is a living person. When conflict arises over neutrality, discuss details on the talk page, and follow dispute resolution.


Wikipedia is free content that anyone can edit and distribute. Respect copyright laws, and avoid plagiarizing your sources. Since all your contributions are freely licensed to the public, no editor owns any article; all of your contributions can and will be mercilessly edited and redistributed.


Wikipedians should interact in a respectful and civil manner. Respect and be polite to your fellow Wikipedians, even when you disagree. Apply Wikipedia etiquette, and avoid personal attacks. Find consensus, avoid edit wars, and remember that there are 3,471,947 articles on the English Wikipedia to work on and discuss. Act in good faith, never disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point, and assume good faith on the part of others. Be open and welcoming.


Wikipedia does not have firm rules. Rules on Wikipedia are not fixed in stone, and the spirit of the rule trumps the letter of the rule. Be bold in updating articles and do not worry about making mistakes. Your efforts do not need to be perfect; prior versions are saved, so no damage is irreparable.

* * *
Wikipedia: What Wikipedia is not
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"WP:NOT" redirects here. For Wikipedia's notability guidelines, see Wikipedia:Notability.
This page documents an English Wikipedia policy, a widely accepted standard that all editors should normally follow. Changes made to it should reflect consensus.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia and, as a means to that end, an online community of individuals interested in building a high-quality encyclopedia in a spirit of mutual respect. Therefore, there are certain things that Wikipedia is not.
Contents
• 1 Style and format
o 1.1 Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia
• 2 Content
o 2.1 Wikipedia is not a dictionary
o 2.2 Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought
o 2.3 Wikipedia is not a soapbox or means of promotion
o 2.4 Wikipedia is not a mirror or a repository of links, images, or media files
o 2.5 Wikipedia is not a blog, webspace provider, social networking, or memorial site
o 2.6 Wikipedia is not a directory
o 2.7 Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook, or scientific journal
o 2.8 Wikipedia is not a crystal ball
o 2.9 Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information
o 2.10 Wikipedia is not censored
• 3 Community
o 3.1 Wikipedia is not a democracy
o 3.2 Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy
o 3.3 Wikipedia is not a battleground
o 3.4 Wikipedia is not an anarchy

* * *
Strengths, weaknesses, and article quality in Wikipedia
Main pages: Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is so great and Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is not so great
See also: Reliability of Wikipedia and Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia
Wikipedia's greatest strengths, weaknesses, and differences all arise because it is open to anyone, it has a large contributor base, and its articles are written by consensus, according to editorial guidelines and policies.
 Wikipedia is open to a large contributor base, drawing a large number of editors from diverse backgrounds. This allows Wikipedia to significantly reduce regional and cultural bias found in many other publications, and makes it very difficult for any group to censor and impose bias. A large, diverse editor base also provides access and breadth on subject matter that is otherwise inaccessible or little documented. A large number of editors contributing at any moment also means that Wikipedia can produce encyclopedic articles and resources covering newsworthy events within hours or days of their occurrence. It also means that like any publication, Wikipedia may reflect the cultural, age, socio-economic, and other biases of its contributors. There is no systematic process to make sure that "obviously important" topics are written about, so Wikipedia may contain unexpected oversights and omissions. While most articles may be altered by anyone, in practice editing will be performed by a certain demographic (younger rather than older, male rather than female, rich enough to afford a computer rather than poor, et cetera) and may, therefore, show some bias. Some topics may not be covered well, while others may be covered in great depth.
 Allowing anyone to edit Wikipedia means that it is more easily vandalized or susceptible to unchecked information, which requires removal. See Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism. While blatant vandalism is usually easily spotted and rapidly corrected, Wikipedia is more subject to subtle viewpoint promotion than a typical reference work. However, bias that would be unchallenged in a traditional reference work is likely to be ultimately challenged or considered on Wikipedia. While Wikipedia articles generally attain a good standard after editing, it is important to note that fledgling articles and those monitored less well may be susceptible to vandalism and insertion of false information. Wikipedia's radical openness also means that any given article may be, at any given moment, in a bad state, such as in the middle of a large edit, or a controversial rewrite. Many contributors do not yet comply fully with key policies, or may add information without citable sources. Wikipedia's open approach tremendously increases the chances that any particular factual error or misleading statement will be relatively promptly corrected. Numerous editors at any given time are monitoring recent changes and edits to articles on their watchlist.
 Wikipedia is written by open and transparent consensus—an approach that has its pros and cons. Censorship or imposing "official" points of view is extremely difficult to achieve and usually fails after a time. Eventually for most articles, all notable views become fairly described and a neutral point of view reached. In reality, the process of reaching consensus may be long and drawn-out, with articles fluid or changeable for a long time while they find their "neutral approach" that all sides can agree on. Reaching neutrality is occasionally made harder by extreme-viewpoint contributors. Wikipedia operates a full editorial dispute resolution process, one that allows time for discussion and resolution in depth, but one that also permits disagreements to last for months before poor-quality or biased edits are removed. A common conclusion is that Wikipedia is a valuable resource and provides a good reference point on its subjects.
 That said, articles and subject areas sometimes suffer from significant omissions, and while misinformation and vandalism are usually corrected quickly, this does not always happen. (See for example this incident in which a person inserted a fake biography linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations and Soviet Russia as a joke on a co-worker which went undetected for four months, saying afterwards he "didn’t know Wikipedia was used as a serious reference tool.")
 Wikipedia is written largely by amateurs. Those with expert credentials are given no additional weight. Some experts contend that expert credentials are given less weight than contributions by amateurs. Wikipedia is also not subject to any peer review for scientific or medical or engineering articles. One advantage to having amateurs write in Wikipedia is that they have more free time on their hands so that they can make rapid changes in response to current events. The wider the general public interest in a topic, the more likely it is to attract contributions from non-specialists.
The MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia retains a history of all edits and changes, thus information added to Wikipedia never "vanishes". Discussion pages are an important resource on contentious topics. Therefore, serious researchers can often find a wide range of vigorously or thoughtfully advocated viewpoints not present in the consensus article. Like any source, information should be checked. A 2005 editorial by a BBC technology writer comments that these debates are probably symptomatic of new cultural learnings that are happening across all sources of information (including search engines and the media), namely "a better sense of how to evaluate information sources."[3]
* * *
Wikipedia: Why Wikipedia is so great
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This essay contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. Essays may represent widespread norms or minority viewpoints. Consider these views with discretion.
As you read and edit Wikipedia, at some point you may ask yourself: "Just why is Wikipedia so great? What accounts for its enormous growth and success?" In order to answer this question, users have written some explanations and arguments on this page. For comparison, see also why Wikipedia is not so great, and Wikipedia:Replies to common objections. You can arrive at a well-informed conclusion thereafter.

Editing
 Wikipedia articles are easy to edit. Anyone can click the "edit" link and edit an article. Obtaining formal peer review for edits is not necessary, since review is a communal function here and everyone who reads an article and corrects it is a reviewer. Essentially, Wikipedia is self-correcting – over time, articles improve from a multitude of contributions. There is an entire infrastructure for people seeking comments, or other opinions on editorial matters, and as a result Wikipedia has got "consensus seeking" down to a fine art. We prefer (in most cases) that people just go in and make changes they deem necessary; the community is by and large quick to respond to dubious edits (if any) and either revert or question them. This is very efficient; our efforts seem more constructivethan those on similar projects (not to mention any names).
 Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, repeatedly mentions in his book "Weaving the Web" that the web has grown into a medium that is much easier to read than to edit. He envisaged the web as a much more collaborative medium than it currently is, and thought that the browser should also function as an editor. Wiki-based sites are closer to his vision. In fact, the first web browser was also a web editor.
 While traditional encyclopedias might be revised annually, current affairs articles, as well as older articles being edited, are updated thousands of times an hour. That's a big deal if your interest is in current affairs, recent science, pop culture, or any other field that changes rapidly.
 Errors to Wikipedia are usually corrected within seconds, rather than within months as it would be for a paper encyclopedia. If someone sees something wrong within an article, they can simply fix it themselves. Compare that to the long, arduous and tedious process that it requires to report and fix a problem in a paper encyclopedia.
 On Wikipedia, there are no required topics and no one is setting assignments. That means that anyone can find part of the encyclopedia they're interested in and add to it immediately (if they can do better than what's already there). This increases motivation and keeps things fun.
 Wikipedia is open content, released under the GNU Free Documentation License. Knowing this encourages people to contribute; they know it's a public project that everyone can use.
 Where else can you get lovely articles on such-and-such town or so-and-so bizarre hobby written by actual residents/practitioners? (Of course, some view this as a curse.) Many articles on Wikipedia will likely never have an entry in a paper encyclopedia.
 The use of talk pages. If an article doesn't cover something, you can ask about it.
 Requesting articles. If any article you try to find isn't here, simply request it.
 Many critics of Wikipedia insist articles are written by amateurs and are not reliable, but in fact many contributors on specific matters are professionals or have firsthand knowledge on the subjects they write about.

Organization
 Wikipedia has almost no bureaucracy; one might say it has none at all. But it isn't total anarchy. There are social pressures and community norms, but perhaps that by itself doesn't constitute bureaucracy, because anybody can go in and make any changes they feel like making. And other people generally like it when they do. So there aren't any bottlenecks; anyone can come in and make progress on the project at any time. The project is self-policing. Editorial oversight is more or less continuous with writing, which seems, again, very efficient. But in some cases, there will be "locked" articles, to prevent vandalism, on subjects like the President of the United States.
 Life isn't fair, and internet communities usually aren't fair either. If some random administrator doesn't like you on an internet forum, you'll be gone from there fairly quickly, because they run the place so they make the rules. But on Wikipedia, everyone can edit by default. Even if you're a bad speller, or even if you're too young to legally tell us your name, or even if you have a controversial point of view, or even if you hate Wikipedia, as long as you can improve our articles you are welcome to contribute. Of course, we ban people who are impossibly destructive, but even then we will sometimes give them a second chance. We have over 1,800 administrators who check each others' decisions.

Comprehensiveness and depth
 Wikipedia is by far the world's largest encyclopedia. It is considered the largest and most comprehensive compilation of knowledge that anybody has seen in the history of the human race. With the English Wikipedia now having more than three million articles, it is already well over twenty times the size of what was previously seen as the world's largest encyclopedia (the largest edition of theEncyclopedia Britannica, which contains 65,000 articles). With each new article, information is becoming more accessible than it ever has before.
 Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy makes it an excellent place to gain a quick understanding of controversial topics. Want a good overview of the Arab-Israeli conflict but only have ten minutes to spare? Wondering what all the fuss is about in Kashmir or what the pro/con arguments are about stem cell research? Wikipedia is a great place to start.
 Wikipedia is not paper, and that is a good thing because articles are not strictly limited in size as they are with paper encyclopedias.
 Articles seem to be getting steadily more polished. Articles have a tendency to get gradually better and better, particularly if there is one person working on an article with reasonable regularity (in that case, others have a tendency to help). There are some articles we can all point to that started out life mediocre at best and are now at least somewhat better than mediocre. Now suppose this project lasts for many years and attracts many more people, as seems perfectly reasonable to assume. Then how could articles not be burnished to a scintillating luster?
 Wikipedia seems to attract highly intelligent, articulate people (with the exception of repeat vandals) with some time on their hands. Moreover, there are some experts at work here. Over time, the huge amount of solid work done by hobbyists and dilettantes can (and no doubt will) be hugely improved upon by experts. This both makes Wikipedia a pleasant intellectual community (or so it seems to some) and gives us some confidence that the quality of Wikipedia articles will, in time, if not yet, be high.
 Furthermore, because these highly intelligent people come from all over the world, Wikipedia can give the reader a genuine "world view".
 To use an extended metaphor, Wikipedia is very fertile soil for knowledge. As encyclopedia articles grow, they can attract gardeners who will weed and edit them, while the discussion between community members provides light to help their growth. By consistent effort and nourishment, Wikipedia articles can become beautiful and informative.
 The sheer amount of information in one search on Wikipedia compared to dredging the murky depths of various search engines to find hundreds of pages of a topic which are by no means accurate, contain only a few sentences of useful knowledge and may even contain viruses.

Vandalism
 Wikipedia, by its very nature, resists destructive edits (known as Vandalism). All previous revisions of an article are saved and stored. Once vandalism is committed, in three or four clicks we can have it reverted. Think about it: To vandalize a page extensively, you would probably need around thirty seconds (unless it involved simply blanking the page). Compare that to the five to ten seconds it takes to revert an article. Couple that with IP blocking and dedicated souls that monitor edits to the encyclopedia, and you have a solid resistance against destructive edits.
 The chance of encountering destructive edits that you can't immediately spot, is slim. Most vandalism involves blatantly replacing parts of the page or adding immediately visible nonsense to the article – very few cases involve introducing misinformation, and even fewer misinformation and hoax edits actually slip through.

Success Factors
 Wikipedia's success mainly depends on its users, the Wikipedians.
 In theory, everybody can be a Wikipedian, but does the theory hold true in practice?
 The idea is that the Wiki-community of Wikipedians is a special group of people who have special characteristics. To account for these special characteristics, we have provided the following factor model:
 User factors
 Openness
 Computer skills
 Motivation
 Neutrality
 Flat hierarchy
 Knowledge factors
 Type of knowledge
 Fast changing rate
 Peer review
 Technology factors
 Easy usability
 Fast access
 Infinite reach, multilingual
 Flexible structure
 Safe
 All of these factors play together to accomplish the goal of successful knowledge creation and knowledge sharing.

Etc.
 We have a slowly growing source of traffic—and therefore more contributors, and therefore (very possibly, anyway) an increasing rate of article-writing—from Google and Google-using search engines like AOL, Netscape, and a9. The greater the number and quality of Wikipedia articles, the greater the number of people will link to us, and therefore the higher the rankings (and numbers of listings) we'll have on Google. Hence, on Wikipedia "the rich (will) get richer"; or "if we build it, they will come" and in greater and greater numbers.
 Our likelihood of success seems encouragingly high. On January 23, 2003 we reached 100,000 articles, and we have since passed 10,000,000 articles, with over 3,000,000 English articles alone. If Wikipedia hits it big, or even simply continues as it has been, which seems plausible, then all potential articles might be covered... eventually.
 Wikipedia is free. Many online encyclopedias are not. What's more, Wikipedia has no ads!
 It's a good feeling seeing that one's contribution is potentially read by thousands of surfers.
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Wikipedia: Why Wikipedia is not so great
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This essay contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. Essays may represent widespread norms or minority viewpoints. Consider these views with discretion.
Nothing is flawless, and Wikipedia is no exception. This page enumerates user opinions on why Wikipedia is not so great. For formal criticisms, see Criticism of Wikipedia.
Much of the presented criticism is debated in separate articles: Why Wikipedia is so great, and Replies to common objections.
The opinions below are grouped into McClaven sets. Since 2003, problems of inaccuracy (below under: Accuracy) were considered by some as the biggest issue. However, also in 2003, others felt "POV pushing" (biasing, under: NPOVness (non-bias)) to be a bigger problem, because statements could contain accurate facts, but only express one viewpoint about a subject, rather than being a balanced, impartial treatment. Several issues describe problems caused by open, anonymous gatherings of people in Wikipedia, such as writing vitriol (noted in 2003) or wiki-gangs (noted in July 2005).
Many issues were added to this essay over 5 years ago (by 2004), but the essay began in 2001 as a humorous numbered list of issues, edited into serious tone in January 2004, and divided into subtitled sections on 01-July-2004.
Technical/usability issues
 Discussion (talk) pages are clunky and inefficient, trying to reuse the generic page editing approach for a multithreaded discussion. It may be possible to use it effectively, but it is very difficult to discover how to do so.
 One centralized Wikipedia server lacks robustness against server or network problems. It also makes no sense given the distribution of users by language worldwide.
 Mirrors are not always swiftly updated. Misinformation which is quickly corrected in Wikipedia itself may persist for some time in the mirrors. Wikipedia itself prevents any real solution to this problem by failing to encourage others to improve articles, instead demanding that Wikimedia be the cited source for any copy, even a vastly improved copy such as those that appear often at Wikinfo.
 Wikipedia can run so slowly as to become unusable for editing or for consultation. PHP is just not a fit basis for a serious online service of this scale.
Collaboration practices and internal social issues
Bureaucracy
 Despite claims to the opposite, Wikipedia is a bureaucracy, full of rules described as "policies" and "guidelines" with a hierarchy aimed at enforcing these (sometimes contradictorily) and with many individuals promoting instruction creep. It is asserted that this has been used to delete useful information and informative images and to deface articles through over-application of bureaucratic processes. Debates as part of the bureaucratic process divert individuals from editing and improving articles.

Behavioral/cultural problems
 People raise endless objections on Talk pages, instead of fixing what bothers them (see Wikipedia:When people complain rather than edit). On the other hand, people can be too bold in updating pages instead of discussing changes on Talk first. It's impossible to tell in advance how contentious something is, because there's no serious indicator of it other than Wikipedia:edit summary and the relative frequency of page edits in the recent past.
 The self-esteem of a bad writer with a fragile ego may be damaged by people always correcting horrible prose, redundancies, bad grammar and spelling. Especially if they do more than just correct, and lecture the poor person. Maybe not realizing they are young or not using English as a native language – which further discourages contribution by people who could correct some bias or balance problem.
 If you have correctly internalized rules of English capitalization, spelling, punctuation or typesetting, you end up making trivial corrections rather than getting on with content. This is sadly necessary, but, there's simply no way to reward these poor users in the present regime of controls.
 If you revert or ban too quickly, sometimes a useful contributor will be turned away. If you revert or ban too slowly, then extra time will be wasted by good editors correcting the junk added. Wikipedia administrator vandalism itself is only kept under control by weak means – there's insufficient power to desysop a popular tyrant. Only the most abusive administrators have their status removed, perhaps 2% of the total.
 A user can exercise ownership over the topics they have the time and energy to "defend". Self-appointed censors, fanatics, or other sufficiently dedicated users can further an agenda or prohibit new ideas through persistent attention to a particular page. Even listing examples of this creates problems, such as false accusations and harassment.
 People revert edits without explaining themselves (Example: an edit on Economics) (a proper explanation usually works better on the talk page than in an edit summary). Then, when somebody reverts back, also without an explanation, an edit war often results. There's not enough grounding in Wikiquette to explain that bald uncommented reverts are rude and almost never justified except for spam and simple vandalism, and even in those cases it needs to be stated for tracking purposes.
 There's a culture of hostility and conflict, rather than of good will and cooperation. Even experienced Wikipedians fail to assume good faith in their collaborators. Fighting off the barbarians at our gate is a higher priority than incorporating them into our community. There is also no acknowledgement, ever, that multiple "communities" might be using Wikipedia, some of them not by choice, but because they feel they have to respond to things or people using it.
 Wikipedia is an honor culture. Honor cultures are defined by anthropologists as cultures in which three conditions exist: 1. lack of resources; 2. lack of an effective state, or law enforcement; and 3. bad behavior goes un-punished and/or is rewarded. Typically honor cultures are places like Appalachia America (the Hatfields and McCoys) or the Scottish Highlands. They are characterized by feuding and gangs. HC's also exist in inner-city youth gangs. How is Wikipedia an honor culture? 1. Lack of resources. For any article, there is limited "real estate", there is only one article and everyone must fight over their contribution to it. 2. Lack of an effective state. For the most part, users are required to stick up for themselves – if someone wrongs you, you are expected to take action on your own. One normally can't just call up the police to resolve a dispute. 3. Bad behavior pays. For the most part, one can typically get away with a lot on Wikipedia by behaving badly when it pays to do so. Honor Cultures are violence prone places. They breed strife and conflict.

Controlling problematic users vs. allowing wide participation
 The very worst problem is that people think in terms of "controlling" users, and defining them as a "problem", as if there necessarily would be some judgmental view that could achieve that fairly. Would you talk about "controlling problem citizens" in a democracy? Absolutely not. Instead we closely and rigorously control words like "suspect", "criminal", "illegal" and make them meaningless and totally ineffective except in the context of a very fairly arbitrated adversarial process with a long history. There's none of that when some influential "Wikipedian" labels a person a "problem".
 That said, there are balance and bias problems introduced by lack of controls. Anonymous users with very strong opinions and a lot of time can change many articles to support their views. Aside from IP blocks and bans for the most obnoxious, there is no means of preventing this other than attention by experienced editors, who are rare. There's no hierarchy of regular, senior, topical editors to make final rulings on extremely complex matters, e.g. by forcing two with very different views to agree.
 IP range blocks can reduce participation if they are for ranges selected and assigned dynamically by IP providers, both dial-up and broadband, making Wikipedia administrator vigilantiism a particular problem. It may even be impossible to protest an unjust ban using the wiki channel itself, which is very unreasonable.
 If Wikipedia follows the pattern of every other 'community forum' on the net, small groups will become powerful to the exclusion of others. Thus the priority, inherent bias and hostility issues are likely to get worse. The increasingly nebulous "troll" could be used as an excuse for excluding people from the decision making processes behind the encyclopedia. The insistence that a cabal must exist typically stems from this concern.
 Geeks run the place. Wikipedia has become more and more hierarchical in order to 'defend freedom' from 'trolling'. This despite the fact that the Internet troll article itself acknowledges the obvious subjectivity of the term, and that it's effectively a power word used to dehumanize others. There are administrators who can delete articles. There are no checks or balances on this power built into the system, other than the attention contributors have time to give, whereas their ability to delete and ban is built in at the coding level. Administrators can seriously damage the site if their account is broken into, e.g. by history merges.
 Editors have learned that formation into "gangs" is the most effective way of imposing their views on opposite-minded contributors. It makes a travesty of the revert-rule when one individual can simply send an e-mail alert to friends requesting a timely "revert favour" once he has reached the limit of his daily reverts. This may apply to deletion debates as well, where a group of editors may be organised so as to always vote en masse in favour of keeping an article written by one of the gang, or related to the gang's main field of interest; or to push through deletion if their interest is a deletionism. Gangs sometimes do serious damage to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines also; by ganging up they can be written to say almost anything.

Personal interests of contributors and others
 This site is creating large numbers of wikipediholics who could be doing something more useful. Calling them addicts or cultists might not be entirely incorrect.
 Authors cannot claim authorship of any article. This makes it hard to use even the authorship of astonishingly good articles as a credential, in part because they may change before anyone looks.
 Those disaffected with humanity are provided with an outlet for their vitriol, rather than having to become misanthropes, terrorists or political researchers. Some people will take great pleasure in demonstrating the idiotic futility of such rubbish. This seems like a positive quality of Wikipedia, until one realizes that any sufficiently toxic or stupid view will quickly acquire more adherents, and that defenders of a particular view will tend to create factions that might soon exist offline. And that any group perceiving itself as beleaguered or disadvantaged will band together more readily, and achieve common cause more readily. Is Wikipedia the breeding ground for this century's cults?
 Instead of just stating the facts, many authors feel the need to attack their own pet peeves of the article's subject. They adopt pedantic tones as they correct "common belief" or "false assumption," when the facts alone are all that is necessary.
 The fact that any editor can edit any article regardless of competence in the subject matter may imperil the quality of articles on highly technical subjects. In case a dispute over the content of such an article ensues, an editor without specific competence can easily reorganize the content of the article based on faulty understanding of the subject.
 Deletion reviews rely on users making reasonable decisions for the wikipedia. In practice people treat the reviews as popularity contests for the article rather than attempting to follow policy (hence articles like fuck which are essentially dictionary articles). In theory the admins should fix this by checking the policy arguments, but in practice they usually count votes.

Article content issues
Accuracy
 This is the single best problem about Wikipedia (or is POV pushing bigger?) . Anyone can add subtle nonsense or accidental misinformation to articles that can take weeks or even months to be detected and removed (which has happened since at least 2002). Users who are not logged in can also do this.
 Dross can proliferate, rather than become refined, as rhapsodic authors have their articles revised by ignorant editors.
 Some of the information can be misleading, but it can be fixed quickly.

Completeness
 People attach {{stub}} instead of finding information to add to the topic, which causes Wikipedia to contain an abundance of articles which are merely a line or two long. Editors who find stubs are often not experts in the subject but want to learn more. Consequently, if they do actually add any content, it might lack in quality.
 Anyone can remove huge amounts of text from articles or even the entire article itself, ruining lots of work. This is referred to as "blanking" by those in the Wikipedia community, and is consideredvandalism. Such "blanking" is typically fixed (by reverting to the previous version of the page, before the text was removed), within minutes. However, within those few minutes, or in the few cases where such blanking is first noticed by a viewer who is not aware of the history feature of Wikipedia pages, a page may seem to be severely lacking information, or be otherwise incomplete, due to this removal.
 Anyone can insert huge amounts of text into an article, destroying readability and all sense of proportion. Attempts to redress this are often futile and occasionally result in warnings, due to the inherent bias in the Wikipedia community that bigger is somehow better.

Concerns about large-scale negative cultural and social effects
Although many articles in newspapers have concentrated on minor -- indeed trivial -- factual errors in Wikipedia articles, there are also concerns about large scale, presumably unintentional effects from the increasing influence and use of Wikipedia as a research-tool at all levels. In an article in the Times Higher Education magazine (London),[1] the radical philosopher, Martin Cohen, accused Wikipedia of having "become a monopoly" with "all the prejudices and ignorance of its creators imposed too". Cohen cites the examples of the Wikipedia entries on Maoism (which he implies is unfairly characterised as simply the use of violence to impose political ends) and Socrates, who (on Wikipedia at least) is "Plato's teacher who left behind not very many writings", which to readers of the Times Higher Education at least, is patent nonsense.
The example of Socrates is offered to illustrate the shallow knowledge base of editors who may then proceed to make sweeping judgements. There are many instances which have been discussed both within and outside Wikipedia of the supposed 'Western', 'white' bias of the encyclopedia, for example the assertion that 'philosophy' as an activity is essentially a European invention and discovery. Cohen accuses Wikipedia's editors of having a 'youthful cab-drivers' perspective, by which he means they are strongly opinionated and lack the tools of serious researchers to adopt a more objective standpoint.

NPOVness (non-bias)
The issue of text neutrality (or "NPOVness") involves several concerns about the content of Wikipedia and the choice of articles that are created:
 Many philosophers have argued that there is nothing that is completely true for everyone in all contexts. Therefore it might be so that Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy is doomed to fail because no chunk of text will be considered perfectly neutral to everyone. Even the idea that a NPOV is achievable is in itself a POV. Cory Doctorow (in a response to other criticisms by Jaron Lanier) emphasized the value of transparent history: "being able to see multiple versions of [any issue], organized with argument and counter-argument, will do a better job of equipping you to figure out which truth suits you best." But this doesn't help the casual reader and certainly would not help one equipped only with a static CD or print version in some future third-world village. Doctorow acknowledges that: True, reading Wikipedia is a media literacy exercise. You need to acquire new skill-sets to parse out the palimpsest. He argues it's fun, but he writes for a living and studies these things.
 Political topics can end up looking like CNN's Crossfire rather than an encyclopedia article, with point-counterpoint in every sentence when a neutral statement of fact would do better. (e.g. Bill Clinton did this good thing but some say it was bad. He also did this bad thing but some say it was not so bad as opposed to Bill Clinton did this thing and then that thing.) To put it another way, good writing makes NPOV flow like an encyclopedia; not-so-good writing makes it flow like "Crossfire". But even given that peer review will improve the standard over time, are there really enough good writers with enough time involved in Wikipedia to mitigate this weakness? Extremists tend to dominate and polarize discourse on politics, economics and any other inherently contentious field.
 A corollary is that only the most contentious topics or aspects of a topic draw enough attention to really improve. Doctorow (passim): The Britannica tells you what dead white men agreed upon, Wikipedia tells you what live Internet users are fighting over. Wikipedia is indeed inherently contentious, which makes it a good real time strategy game, but is it a good encyclopedia? Doctorow says: "Wikipedia entries are nothing but the emergent effect of all the angry thrashing going on below the surface... if you want to really navigate the truth via Wikipedia, you have to dig into those ‘history’ and ‘discuss’ pages hanging off of every entry. That's where the real action is, the tidily organized palimpsest of the flamewar that lurks beneath any definition of ‘truth’". But while conflict theory and market-based methods assume that editorial imbalance and editorial biases are most effectively limited by adversarial process, this may simply not be true. Some independent research (by IBM TJ Watson Labs) did seem to indicate that the very best articles resulted from extremist attention and attempts to moderate it, e.g. evolution, abortion, capitalism, Islam. This may also be true of articles about politicians. But only a tiny number of the articles ever become the subject of a troll war or even more than a limited edit war. So if adversarial process is required, most articles just aren't getting it.
 NPOV is a syntactic, not semantic, protection (concerned only with how things are stated, contrary to popular belief among Wikipedia editors it doesn't determine how well or fairly or evenly things are presented) and ideologically refusing to offer more than ArbCom, is an editorial cop-out quite possibly imposed by Jimmy Wales' insistence on staying in charge. One failing, as Robert McHenryargues in an article on balance and its lack at Wikipedia, is to consider the demographics of the users at all or explicitly plan the balance of the product as was proposed as far back as 2003. McHenry argues that letting chaos and Internet trolls set all the priorities isn't the way to achieve encyclopedic balance, and asks: In the absence of planning and some degree of central direction, how else could it have been? There are some good answers to this, notably a more regular overall governance method, but they weren't implemented. A fully qualified editorial board was never actually recruited at all, though many names were kicked around once.
 Consensus may be a problematic form of knowledge production. A 1491 article on the shape of the world may have maintained, by consensus, that it was flat. What may appear to be a "point of view" may actually be greater knowledge and subtlety of thought than most Wikipedia users, including editors, possess. A consensus model (i.e. "What most people think" or what Wikipedia editors think is neutral) may leave us with entries defined by "Flat Worlders."
 The systemic failures mean that the NPOV problem of Wikipedia is too easily seen as the fault of the person who changed the article to become problematic, rather than a systematic fault of Wikipedia. It is an unfair double standard to attribute Wikipedia's strong points to Wikipedia itself, but its weaknesses to those responsible for the problems. This is however a familiar theme – incults. There are in fact some definitions of a "Wikipedia cultist" which echo some of the published criticisms.
 A new Internet user coming to Wikipedia for the first time (often through a link directly to the article via a general web search) will not know that articles are supposed to be NPOV and that if they detect these parts they can and should rewrite them. Doctorow says that the important thing about systems isn't how they work, it's how they fail. Fixing a Wikipedia article is simple, but, that is only fixing the article. Fixing the process that fails to alert the reader to the fact that they can (or might have to) fix the article, gets no attention at all. It's just left as consequence of various technical decisions. There's almost no effort to orient or train new users, and certainly none to deliberately recruit communities of under-represented people (to the balance concern above).
 Many users reflexively defend their text when possible POV is pointed out rather than reflexively making a zealous attempt to strip POV from their text instead.
 If text is perceived as POV, then it doesn't reflect well on Wikipedia. This term means "bad", but it is used in a pretty much random way. In reality there are three steps to seeing large amounts of your contributions removed by faster (not "better") editors:
1. Someone will say "this is POV" and change it to say nothing at all, or the opposite of what it said.
2. When you restore it, even in mediated form, it will be demanded that you provide more sources or citations, even on pages that have almost none, or in fields in which very few references publish in the conventional way – abusive and selective requirements to defend claims are all over the place.
3. Finally, you will be labelled an Internet troll for failing to comply with these demands, and the so-called "Wikipedia:community ban" (a form of lynching) will be imposed to ensure that no view seriously challenging that of the majority will ever manage to "stick" on Wikipedia pages. Even if it's correct. Especially if it's correct! Truth is not the criterion for inclusion in Wikipedia.
 Because there's no way to split irreconcilable POVs, unlike Wikinfo, you might have to work with people who believe the polar opposite to you on a given subject, and their opinion might win the day for reasons other than being correct. For example, a monomaniac, no matter how ignorant or even malicious, may "win out" eventually, because non-monomaniacs have other things to do than argue with them.
 Alternately, you might not have to work with anyone who believes the opposite to you. The stability of an article is relative to the people who are paying attention to it. Especially for less visited articles, these are not representative of all relevant POVs. Thus, often you will establish consensus for something which is still horribly POV. For instance articles on small indie bands will inevitably praise the band, because few who dislike their music are even remotely interested in their article. And, since the risk of being called an Internet troll is high, even those who do are going to be outnumbered, and possibly abused.
 Many people with causes come here to "get the word out" because publishers laugh at their stuff and site hosting costs money. So we get detailed articles about obscure activists, while the opposing establishment figures get stubs whose content is a litany of all the evil things they've done to the obscure activists, e.g. Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch vs Accounting scandals of 2002.Whether this is a good example or not depends on whether you think the mass media is biased very strongly the other way, and gives those establishment figures more credibility than they deserve.
 Many people with national or ethnic heroes come here to "get the word out" as well, meaning that the importance of the contributions of an individual to a particular field of endeavour can tend to be overstated (even grossly overstated) because of their belonging to a particular nation or ethnic group.
 Most, if not all, contributors have a political bias, even if they pretend not to or think that they don't. Effectively, they are all working to subvert articles one way or another, as politics defies NPOV. Yet attempts to define Wikipedia:political disputes continue to fail in part because people who pretend to be "not political" claim it's just an editorial problem, not a real world issue creeping in. They even refuse to recognize Wikipedia:identity disputes as a distinct type of problem, which is more or less insane. If one group happens to have more resources, i.e. time, than other contributors, their views will prevail. Of all the so-called problems of Wikipedia this one however is least problematic: just invite their opponents who have a stake in correcting it, as Wikipedia is a big visible reference that's hard to ignore.
 Articles tend to be whatever-centric. People point out whatever is exceptional about their home province, tiny town or bizarre hobby, without noting frankly that their home province is completely unremarkable, their tiny town is not really all that special or that their bizarre hobby is, in fact, bizarre. In other words, articles tend to a sympathetic point of view on all obscure topics or places.
 Ideas to which most people related to new technologies are hostile (for example, arguments in favor of digital rights management) get reverted without thought even if written to NPOV. This is part of the systemic bias problem, as open content editors oppose DRM ideologically – an excellent example of how treatment of a Wikipedia:political dispute ought to be different than other editorial disputes.
 Wikipedia is hostile to whole fields of inquiry, as when there is controversy between "hard" scientists and scholars in any other field, Wikipedia will favor the scientists. In part due to rules on citation and what constitutes a "journal". This very readily leads to scientism, as articles rarely address epistemological differences between the ways various sciences experiment and disprove claims. Even within "hard" science, the relatively certainty of something like the atomic weight of gases (easy to verify by experiment in any lab) and the absolute potential bogosity of a new physical particle (verifiable only at vast expense in equipment that costs many billions each), is never addressed. Though a few articles like infrastructure bias do explain that issue, use of terms like "universe" or "cosmology" for instance will strongly favour astronomers' views.
 Users can avoid POV criticism by cherry-picking NPOV details of an issue. By neglecting certain facts and presenting others, a series of NPOV statements as a whole may compose a very POV picture. As most Wikipedians miss the forest for the trees, such POV problems are rarely identified. And any attempt to systematically point that out, for instance, to remove anarchism, militarism,economism, scientism, legalism, or consumerism, is just as "systematically" squashed by those who share one or more of those biases themselves.

Readability and writing style
 The writing quality of some articles is atrocious. In such an article, paragraphs lack any cohesion and trail off without conclusions. Entire sections are composed of orphan sentences, created by piece-meal additions from random users. Similarly formed are the monstrous super-sentences, whose loose multi-layer clauses require the utmost concentration to comprehend. Users whimsically write equation-sentences ("The event is what caused excitement in the scientific community" instead of "the event excited scientists"), knowing nothing of conciseness. Grammar, punctuation and spelling are very good, but style and clarity are ignored. Wikipedians embrace bad "correct" writing, only recognizing its faults when told (or not). Use of passive tense actually seems to be encouraged in an effort to be boring, even when active past tense would be far better. And direct quotes are also sometimes discouraged even when they are entirely appropriate or necessary to the article's claims, or where paraphrasing would be almost certainly misconstrued.
 Many Wikipedians write in a way that is considered acceptable within the author's peer group, but is less comprehensible to the general reader. This may include the use of jargon. There's no systemic effort to remove such stuff.
 In a related problem, large articles constructed via numerous (individually reasonable) edits to a small article can look okay "close up", but are often horribly unstructured, bloated, excessively "factoid", uncohesive and self-indulgent when read through completely. In short, adding a sentence at a time doesn't encourage quality on a larger scale; at some stage, the article must be restructured. This happens nowhere near often enough. Users who try to do this inevitably encounter hostility or resistance, until they figure out that they should do it with a throwaway pseudonym, not a real username.
 Wikipedia articles have a somewhat haphazard usage of American, Australian, British, Canadian, etc., as well as spelling and usage variations of the English language. There is also use of non-English words and names when English equivalents exist. See Manual of Style.

Translation issues
 Translations will always lag behind edits in other languages, meaning that those who read Wikipedia in different languages will get different versions of the facts. Some never get English versions.
 Geek style of language. In languages other than English, a computer geek or a geekish person is often unable to express himself in a fluent written standard language, and prefers a heavily English-influenced, colloquial and unpolished geek jargon. This sort of language is often unreadable or esthetically very displeasing to anyone who reads mainstream literature and press, and makes a singularly unprofessional impression. Besides, it roundly and soundly defeats the very reason why there should be an encyclopedia at all, i.e. providing scientific information and learning for the general public in an accessible language. The fact that writing well is a professional, or semi-professional, skill that has to be particularly learned and acquired is not nearly clear to all Wikipedians. Also, in small-language Wikipedias, the "anti-elitism" of the Wikipedia project too often translates into downright amateurishness.
 In other-language Wikipedias written in endangered, small languages, the linguistic quality of articles can be severely compromised when well-meaning enthusiasts with very limited proficiency in the language try to contribute by writing new articles or tampering with existing articles. Such people can be unable to write a grammatical sentence in the language or even be so linguistically naive that they don't understand why it is so important to write grammatically. Their contributions can even drive away more proficient speakers from joining the community. In fact, the self-correcting nature of the project is turned upside down in such Wikipedias, when tamperers attack perfectly fine articles and try to add snippets of information that are already included in the article, but which the tamperer is not able to spot, because he or she simply isn't proficient enough in the language to understand the article (cf. the edit history of the article about Winston Churchill in the Irish-language Wikipedia[1]). Currently, the problem is very acute in the Irish-language Wikipedia, which has a very bad press among the larger Irish-speaking community. In fact, the project seems to depend on only one person for grammatical accuracy.
 The fact that Wikipedia has so many language editions creates various Wikipedia language communities, and each active Wikipedia has its unique feature, but affects the problem that the facts presented in different language editions might be conflicting. Users who read different language editions might be perplexed.

Overall quality (net-level)
 Popular topics (like abortion) get written about inordinately, whereas less popular ones may never receive much attention, or are hard to find.
 Geek priorities. There are many long and well-written articles on obscure characters in science fiction/fantasy[2][3] and very specialised issues in computer science,[4][5][6] physics and mathematics. Other topic areas are less active.
 Systemic bias in a particular field. For example, the overall quality of inorganic and organic chemistry articles is much better than that of physical chemistry articles[7].
 Absence of concrete examples in the mathematical explanations make them impenetrable to non-mathies.
 Much nonsense is added, and though it's often quickly reverted, it remains in page history making diffs impossible. For example, "Mommy Tulips live in the Philippine Islands. Many baby tulips sprout from her. For more information, please e-mail us at [email here]". What's that about? Not enough of it goes to Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense, which has now been semi-deleted anyway.
 Different view-points tend to create their own closed topologies of pages, and interlinking and comparison can be poor. This is exacerbated by the different camps tending to use different terminology (indeed, it is probably why they do). There's not enough effort to spot pages that must be merged, and sometimes inappropriate merges confuse general with specific abstractions too much.
 In many topics, a lot of stuff is there, but it's not well linked together. New users simply do not understand that articles are supposed to be heavily inter-linked and almost everything is already defined.
 Many users will associate accreditation and cite Wikipedia as a reference. Many institutions will not accept this as certified fact.
 Similarly, it can sometimes be very difficult to collect information as one may become lost in a quagmire of subtly different entries. Some of which are wholly biased but due to factional efforts have become the central article, e.g. the constant effort to redirect Islamist to Islamism which is like redirecting scientist to scientism. The more balanced articles, like Islam as a political movement, are routed around wherever possible to increase exposure of the fanatics.
 Articles become longer much more quickly than they become better. Wikipedia's strong community bias against deletion of text encourages the accretion of many authors' partial (or mis-) understandings of a topic while making it difficult for a rewriter or editor to synthesize them briefly without causing offense. There seems to be a distrust of subject matter experts, as alleged in a2005 article by project co-founder Larry Sanger who calls it anti-elitism. He also criticizes the project's epistemic collectivism and claims it has been taken over by trolls. Which may be true, but as per above it seems almost inevitable, as trolls created it in the first place by picking contentious topics to fight over (Sanger and Wales could reasonably be seen as just the first two such trolls, to judge by their heated exchanges now).
 Stupid articles. Wikipedia has a large number of articles which could be considered rather irrelevant for something billing itself as an encyclopedia, such as "teh" (a misspelling of the word "the"), "Gas mask fetishism" (just one of many of Wikipedia's articles on obscure sexual fetishes), List of films that most frequently use the word "fuck", Goatse (an Internet shock site), Toilets in Japan, and The Flowers of Romance (band) (a band that never played live or recorded any material).
 Infiltration by soapbox-seeking extremists, racists and the like remains a problem. This may not apply to the English-language Wikipedia with its large user community, but again, Wikipedias in smaller languages are very vulnerable to takeover attempts by extremist boarding-parties. Besides, the "geek priorities" problem is seen even here: impractical, misanthropist and extremist political views are extraordinarily common among unsociable geeks. Crypto-fascist, white supremacist and white nationalist organizations trying to infiltrate mainstream politics often use Wikipedia as a way to introduce themselves to a wider public on their own terms.
 Articles about controversial Internet personalities or reality television celebrities might end up deleted due to widespread grudges among Wikipedians against such persons, even though they fulfilled any reasonable notability criteria.
 The same applies to articles about controversial themes. Articles like "Bronze Soldier of Tallinn" and the issue of displaying prophet Muhammad's pictures have been known to ignite flamewars.
Case
 Word form and case has to be exactly right to link to articles. Wikipedia is highly case sensitive. Case of some article titles e.g. Light Characters in the Wheel of Time series can be difficult to figure out even for somewhat experienced users. Most internet search engines are case-insensitive, and that is what most users have come to expect. While the articles themselves should use only correct English case, automatic obvious redirecting or even correcting in the anchor article is not a bad idea. Creating manual redirects for all possible alternate capitalizations of Light Characters in the Wheel of Time series would require 127 redirects, and this only considers the first letter of each word. (That article has since been redirected to Minor Wheel of Time characters reducing the possibilities but retaining the issue). Why not fix this? Surely there is a programmer who can try?
 The user interface of mediawiki capitalizes the first letter of everything, even commands. Except above each page where it uses lowercase everywhere. Why isn't it like that all over the place? For instance why is "Main Page", "Community Portal", the "What" in "What links here", the "Edit" in "Edit summary", all capitalized? If they're not full sentences then they should not have capital letters. It's nearly impossible to train users to use capitalization correctly if the UI does it very badly and (worse) inconsistently.
Miscellaneous
 The inconsistent nature of Wikipedia and its wide variety of audiences and members makes it so that fairness and equal evaluation cannot be easily maintained. Certain articles will remain in favour of others that are identical in terms of quality, merely because those who evaluate the latter do not like the article, or have a different perspective on the article being evaluated.
 Articles are sometimes plagiarised from other sources, infringing on (international) copyright, particularly when no credit is given. The Wikipedia:Copyright problems process only catches a fraction of these.
 Images are a particularly bad case, as it is difficult to spot plagiarism when the uploader lies, but the pedantry and bureaucracy of the tagging scheme leads to other usable and useful images being deleted and removed.
 Edits by scholars and experts who disagree with some of its core values are repelled. This creates a very significant bias problem. Not least in articles about Why Wikipedia is not so great which by no means reflect all the Wikipedia:Criticisms that qualified people have levied on it.
 Similarly, fanatical or stupid users adhering to generally good rules to Wikipedia:avoid self-references and Wikipedia:Redirects have failed to recognize the few places where these are in fact absolutely necessary. Worse, they've failed to create any project to work on these core descriptions of Wikipedia:itself to better understand the project's collective view of itself. If you can't say even what all Wikipedia users have said it "is", what use is it to try to understand their goals? No possible improved process could come without consulting this data, but if genuine self-references and meta references aren't differentiated and tracked better, it can't be easily consulted. See m:governance for an example of a process that might be so applied.
 Because Wikipedia is widely used, often showing up high in Google searches, and its dangers are not well understood by many people, misinformation in Wikipedia articles can easily spread to other external sources. In turn, the external source (which may not have cited the Wikipedia article) may be used as justification for the misinformation in future revisions of the Wikipedia article.This is sometimes called an echo chamber, and some well-known Wikipedians including Wales have done it.
 Wikipedia, especially as it is propagated widely, presents an ideal target for smear campaigns and vicious rumors against individuals. While such smears can be found and edited, the rumors sometimes continue to exist in page histories, on Wikipedia mirror sites and in web-caches.
 Editing Wikipedia is tedious in the case of conflicts. There is no assistance to users caught in it, which is terrible for newbies.
 Personal preference as well as just pure meanheartedness often outrule any sense of right and wrong. Admins are not immune to this either.
 If a user is blocked indefinitely, their block log says "an expiry time of indefinite", which is a very unsensible sentence. Similarly, when they try to edit a page, it says "Your block will expire indefinite".
 The charge of vandalism is broadly applied to useful edits which might oppose the view of other editors.
 In fact "Vandalism" is to "Wikipedia" such as "Witchcraft" is to "Salem," or "Communism" is to "McCarthy;" A term levied about broadly to end discussions and dialogue.
 The "Arguments to avoid" seem to cover every possible argument. As this also eliminates simply voting, users do not have a voice unless they can come up with an argument that is not instantly rejected.
 The overly strict fair use policies and guidelines, i.e. Wikipedia:Non-free content, Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria and Wikipedia:Non-free use rationale guideline, prohibit the exhibition of fair-use images on user pages, even if the user's intention is to list all the fair-use images he or she has uploaded to English Wikipedia. Also, they strongly encourages users to use Linux free-software screenshots instead of Windows proprietary software screenshots, thus cause many software genre articles, such as raster graphics editor unable to contain Windows proprietary software screenshots, e.g. Microsoft Paint or Adobe Photoshop, which are far more familiar to most Wikipedia users than Linux free software, e.g. KolourPaint or GIMP, and cause confusion to them.

Information hoarding
 Information of genuine editorial value, such as how often any given link is clicked from one article to another, is never made available, to help correct the cohesion of related articles or discover two names for the same thing (which would link to a lot of the same articles but never to each other...).

* * *
I wanted to write a treatise on Wikipedia, but I feel that anything I could say would only parrot the multitudinous debates and discussions about the site. Having read through many pages (and shared what I felt that you, the reader, should know), I hereby state my own opinion:

I see a double-standard here. Wikipedia is not considered a good enough source for academic writing and thinking, but its sources themselves are; I have often gone to the Wikipedia page for a paper topic, familiarized myself with said topic, then used the sources cited by Wikipedia as support for my own writing. The same sources that make my papers credible, do not serve the same function for Wikipedia. Why?

I do not think I can truly answer that question, not in any way that will be widely accepted (since I’m neither an expert nor a Wikipedian), but I have suspicions. I think Wikipedia is a hallmark of this large-scale transition I see from a history of the few to a history of everyone. By this I mean that in the past, history was constructed by the winners of wars, the victors in all situations; their story is held to be the truth, accepted by others, recorded in textbooks and taught in schools.

“The past actually happened. History is what someone took the time to write down.” -- A. Whiteney Brown

So much is written down now. With Web 2.0, history – the written down – has multiplied, and with this multiplication has fractured from one unified perspective into thousands, even millions, of different viewpoints. The internet can serve not only to generate this collectivized historical record, but to consolidate it, then present it, either as a cohesive whole (Wikipedia) or as independent, individual streams of history (Facebook, Twitter, “the blogosphere”). With these websites, we can record history as it occurs.

This is especially obvious when one considers my search for information about my grandfather’s life, particularly his service in World War Two. If Twitter, Facebook, even Wikipedia had existed in his time, in all probability I would be able to know more about it. As such, there are details that are lost forever. Is this a good or bad thing? Are those details better known or unknown? Who makes that call?

“We are writing… we are writing… we are writing…”

Veterans Day

“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

“It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

“Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.” – Kurt Vonnegut, in Breakfast of Champions, p. 6.

Today is Veterans Day.

I am not sure what that means. Wikipedia tells me that Veterans Day is “an annual United States holiday honoring military veterans.” (It also says something about eating ravioli.) To me this seems a stupid thing to dedicate a single day to doing; in the United States, elsewhere but especially (to me) on Twitter, it also makes people say ignorant things.

This quote abounded on Twitter today, tweeted and retweeted all over my feed: "If you're reading this thank a teacher, if you're reading this in English thank a veteran." I suppose all veterans, of all wars, ever, encouraged the use of English?

That statement seems doubly empty to me, because I had taught myself to read (out of spite; the adults were keeping secrets from me and I found that unacceptable) by the time I was four years old.

As I was saying, about dedicating a single day to veterans: I feel that if one wishes to honor military veterans, one should do so all the time. Maybe then there would be a list on the Internet of the men in the regiment in which I am told my grandfather served. Maybe VA hospitals would be in better condition. A quick trip to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs website informs me that “Currently, NEPEC estimates that approximately 27,000 new Veterans request services for homelessness each year.”

Shameful.

Veterans Day, indeed.

I feel I have been celebrating this day – by which I mean honoring veterans, or at least thinking about them more than I usually would – at length of late. Yes, my grandfather is especially important to me (after all, some 25% of the DNA in me is, in fact, his), but what of the others? It is with this thought in mind that I have decided to go ahead, without any certainty that my grandfather was in this regiment, and share with you what the 273rd regiment of the 69th division did in the Second World War.

I have debated, too, whether I should paraphrase my source or copy and paste. This piece I am writing, it is like a quilt: it has all these different passages, and hopefully I can stitch them together into a complete, at least quasi-coherent whole.

First things first, the information from the United States Army website:
The 69th Infantry Division was a division of the United States Army during World War II. It was known by the nickname “The Fighting Sixty-ninth” and fought in the European theater. The 69th Division was activated on May 15th of 1943; they were sent overseas to England on December 12th of 1944 and entered combat on February 11th of 1945 (in what the website refers to as “Rhineland” but I believe is actually Germany). They were in combat for 86 days and suffered 1,506 casualties – defined on the site as the “number of killed, wounded in action, captured, and missing.”

The Division is the larger unit, so I will continue in the vein of this larger unit, speaking of their actions more generally, before moving into a discussion of the 273rd Regiment later.

Wikipedia disagrees with the Army website right out of the gate, saying, “The 69th Infantry Division was a formation of the United States Army formed during World War II. It should not be confused with the much older and still existing 69th Infantry Regiment (United States) which is the famed Fighting 69th.” Who to believe? The article goes on to reiterate much of what the Army site stated, adding that the Division returned to the United States on September 13th, 1945, and was inactivated on September 16th that same year. Also on the Wikipedia site is what it calls a “combat chronicle,” more of a play-by-play of the action that this regiment saw in the war.

“The 69th Infantry Division arrived in England, 12 December 1944, where it continued its training. It landed in Le Havre, France, 24 January 1945, and moved to Belgium to relieve the 99th Division, 12 February, and hold defensive positions in the Siegfried Line. The Division went over to the attack, 27 February, capturing the high ridge east of Prether to facilitate use of the Hellenthal-Hollerath highway. In a rapid advance to the east, the 69th took Schmidtheim and Dahlem, 7 March. The period from 9 to 21 March was spent in mopping up activities and training. The Division resumed its forward movement to the west bank of the Rhine, crossing the river and capturing the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, 27 March. It relieved the 80th Division in Kassel, 5 April, seized Hannoversch Münden on the 8th and Weissenfels on the 14th against sharp opposition, and captured Leipzig, 19 April, following a fierce struggle within the city. Eilenburg fell, 23 April, and the east bank of the Mulde River was secured. Two days later, Division patrols in the area between the Elbe and the Mulde Rivers contacted Russian troops in the vicinity of Riesa and again at Torgau on Elbe Day. Until VE-day, the 69th patrolled and policed its area. Occupation duties were given to the Division until it left for home and inactivation 7 September.”

The Wikipedia article cites two main sources, including an online reproduction of The Army Almanac: A Book of Facts Concerning the Army of the United States, which was published in 1950, and http://www.69th-infantry-division.com/ which my father sent me in an email after I stumbled upon it in my own research. This site seems to be the definitive source for information about the 69th Division, and has in fact already been referred to and described in this essay. I would like to get into it in more detail, but I feel that should occur in a different section of the paper.