User:Adam Faanes

Dude. I got a barnstar for uploading a ridiculous number of photos of obscure French statesmen. How crazy is that?

Philosophy of the Wikipedia:

I like the Wikipedia. It's like the internet refined: sure I can google something and find a billion tidbits, but it's often the Wikipedia that has the first, most organized entry on those facts. The 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake, for instance, is probably the best and most accessible source of information on that event on the internet, particularly in the weeks after the event. It's superior to the internet as a whole (Wikipedia !== Internet, even with the broadest doctrine of article inclusion) simply because the Wikipedia provides a huge, single, forum for people to build one narrative or one explanation of a topic, instead of having everything lying around on the floor and having to go one to the next to get a sense of it and still end up shorthanded. The Wikipedia is like a kind of technology that advances the internet as a communications medium.

It's true that the average encyclopedia will probably always have a higher degree of professional writing than the Wikipedia. I don't mind that; it might even have a higher degree of accurate facts. But, to be honest, there's that risk in a normal encyclopedia; while it might be that in the Britannica, 1/1,000,000 sentences contains a factual error, and 1/100 sentences contains an error in the Wikipedia, that still means that 99% of the information in the Wikipedia will be compelling, and being 99% right about something is pretty damn good. Good enough to give you a strong sense of the subject, and at least a literacy in it, even if it won't give you a doctorate. But people don't use encyclopedias to get an absolutely rigorous understanding of a subject; Stephen Hawking isn't going to read an encyclopedia for articles on physics, and frankly, none of my professors will either unless they're interested in getting a pretty basic fact. And, ultimately, I think that the strengths outweigh the costs; a great many articles on the Wikipedia provide an unimaginable level of depth compared to what the Britannica provides. They are far more timely. What is called "systemic bias" strikes me as peculiar; alright, a disproportionate number of articles on this project will be on anime or telvision shows or actors, but that reflects the interests of readers, and why not satisfy that interest? Okay, the article on Britney Spears might be 10 times as long as the article on James II of England (it isn't), but what if the Wikipedia article on James II is ten times longer than the Britannica article on James II? That's fine. The English Wikipedia has well over 500,000 articles; the Britannica boasts only "over 120,000"

What's more is that the articles that people are interested (the ones that, by virtue of "systemic bias" get lots of attention) will get, of course, the most attention, and the inaccuracies will be pushed out.

My Contributions, listed mainly (read: solely) for my personal vanity. And for curious passers-by who want to vex themselves at some kind of pattern.

Contributions in progress

(Please feel no hesitation to correct or add to my work - I make all kinds of mistakes.)

• West Africa
• History of Spain
  • User:Adam Faanes/History of Spain - Work-in-progress.

Things people should work on

(This is kinda my list of things that I might eventually get to myself, but, if you're out and somehow stumbled here, then please, take a look at the following pages and see about adding to/creating them.)

• House of Bourbon
• Niceto Alcala Zamora
• Manuel Azana
• Valois Dynasty
• Fourth Republic
• Fifth Republic
• Carlist Wars
• Miguel Primo de Rivera
• Vincent Auriol
• Rene Coty
• Zanzibar
• History of Oman (the history after 1964 is good, but before that it's rather shabby for such an important empire)