Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica have been locked in a kind of cage match battle for relevancy ever since legions of high schoolers found the former was an excellent tool for half-assing term papers graduating on time research. One thing, however, that hasn’t changed is the length of an article still means something in the Britannica. On Wikipedia, not so much.
Wikipedia is still very much the domain for longwinded parsings of the esoteric, if not completely hallucinated bullshit, a lot of it depending on how motivated that subject’s fanboy corps is. Who’s gonna show up more, Q-Bert’s fans, or President James Buchanan?
Games Radar has put together a list showing the truly distorted priorities of Wikipedia editors and writers, if length is a useful metric. And I think it is. Because according to their analysis, Knuckles from fucking Sonic the Hedgehog gets 7,832 words, and God — yes, that Guy — rates 3,726. There are 14 other hilarious comparisons (Call of Duty vs. World War II; Electronic Gaming Monthly vs Time, etc.) So get out there and start padding entries that really matter: Niko Bellic’s (385 words).
The WTF World of Wikipedia [Games Radar]
Greg Abbott, Texas’ Attorney-General, has filed a civil complaint in federal district court against gaming site Games Radar. Citing the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, Abbott accuses Games Radar of collecting unnecessary information from children under the age of 13, and also of having inadequate age verification processes as part of their member sign-ups, both of which “expose children to dangers on the internet”.
All seems a bit silly to us, especially since it’s all based on the belief the site is targeting young children by covering games based on animated films, but then we weren’t the ones singled out from the crowd (both allegations could be made against any major commercial site like IGN, GameSpot, etc) for special treatment. Games Radar have yet to respond to the allegations. Those after some bedtime reading can find a PDF of the suit below.
