2006.01.15
Wiki, what's a word for repitition
23.30.55 - Mark
Recently I've been finding myself wander around Wikipedia and other wiki-based sites. Despite some of the criticisms of the open source document and user-changeable model that lets wikis thrive I like using wikis. For the articles of relative unimportance (ie I don't need this for a report), but where people love the topic and want to do right by it, its fun to go though.
But there are a couple problem when you start looking at them. The big one is one Jimmy Wales talks about regularly, some of the articles out there border on unreadable. Some can be filled with typos and obvious grammatical errors, or worse, lack any sense of continuity or purpose.
Those are bad. What's worse, and something I've been noticing more recently, is that a phrase, or even a whole paragraph of text will be repeated several times on the same page. On similar pages that can be understandable, and seems to be a fairly common practice, but on the same page its annoying.
I can't recall any single wikipedia article to cite here, but its pretty common most of the wiki based sites I've visited, and I remember seeing a lot of this in-article and cross article repetition at Memory Alpha (Star Trek Wiki Site).
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