If there was a style guide for Wikipedia (I didn't check) it would above all recommend 'the clinical tone of impartial record/sterile chronicle', which is an understandable and even commendable tone for a project that aims to encompass and provide the sum of human knowledge via the internet. However there are moments in which one can discern a personality beyond the dry Wikipedia tone [citation needed]. Sometimes it's a vandal or prankster, and those always lead to the greatest moments of Wikipedia, or the lowest, really. Most of the time it's just the earnest work of the tireless Wikipedian.
I wrote this because I don't believe there is a style guide for Wikipedia at all. There should be a set of loose recommendations and perhaps an editor. I can't blame a non-profit organization for not hiring a full time editor and I can't imagine anyone would particularly want the job (except hungry washed-out writers and editorial staff currently retraining out of Journalism into promising careers like banking, plumbing, or manual labor). Still, it would help a bit. I'm sure that individuals with a highly developed sense of grammar or the English language at large could find spelling and grammar errors at a ratio of .79 : 1 per Wikipedia page.
I know there's not a style guide because articles vary so wildly. Many are written in a serviceable and innocuous style. In the best articles there is no digression and very little error. In the worst, well, you find some surprising laziness. I don't know who exactly the wikipedia editors are – and I'm sure many of them are very well-intentioned, knowledgeable, and capable people – but I get the sense they all have a musty internet smell about them [citation needed]. If they are the standard model for the librarians of the future, we may be doomed, for they will push the business of information right into the private market and/or entertainment industry. Maybe that prediction is a bit pessimistic, but we have no way of knowing whether it was something I wrote with an ironic smirk or caustic dismissal.
Unemployed university graduates, well-intentioned but 'eccentric' private citizens, and pedants make up probably 60% of Wikipedia editors, according to my highly amusing mental image of the average Wikipeditor. The other 40% is probably a remarkable melange of humanity, but I like to focus on the imaginary majority. They are all selflessly promoting the encapsulation and easy retrieval of verified, unbiased, correct information. It's a goal so lofty and impressive it makes me tender-hearted. I wish to offer my sincere thanks for the service, which has absorbed many of my spare hours and to which many more will doubtless be sacrificed, as long as the quality and tone do not spiral out of control.
Am I ridiculous? Allow me to demonstrate my point about Style and Usage, and a further point about the Illiteracy of the Internet Person. I will visit a prominent page of high stature (RoboCop, the 1985 Paul Verhoven movie) and traffic and look around innocently enough for some awkward constructions, grammar violations, and whatever else I deem fucked enough for notice.
Ah. These are the excerpts that inspired me. A pair of beauties. Shall I? I don't particularly want to, you understand: I get no pleasure from this, it's just part of the thing I'm writing a blog post about and nothing personal. I don't know if the RoboCop article gets the Wikipedia Writing A-Team, and if it doesn't, as stated above [where?] I understand that it's not professional copy or anything jesus christ leave an old man alone!
Anyways, 'having come off doing the special effects' as a construction is bad even for the 'first year University student's first hungover all-nighter' level. It's a special blend of missing prepositions and hazy colloquialism. I think it stinks, quite honestly. Shit. If this was written by a person with a post-secondary degree, any degree at all, they can fuck off and get schooled about how to write or leave their helpful insights out of the mix [citation needed]. Even done right ('Having come off of doing the special effects') the phrase is an inefficient abortion. The green line serves to indicate the thrust of the sentence, which asserts (via the erratic grammar of an illiterate) that the studio deciding about Bottin was itself coming off of doing the special effects for John Carpenter's The Thing. Where Bottin is even involved is impossible to discern, unless of course you're not a grammar machine and understand context. However, the lazy error stands, and goddamn it.
As for the inclusion of the second excerpt, I believe you know why I included the second excerpt. Redundancy is wasteful even at the level of the miniscule amount of bytes it takes to write a redundant element into a sentence. It also makes reading anything suck more than it has to, and in that way encourages illiteracy. Unacceptable. I'm not offended or outraged, I'm just having a bit of a laugh [oh yeah?] because 1) I want to have fun, and 2) I think that impeccable content is impossible in Wikipedia, which means the amount of awkward sentences and poorly disguised opinion (which I didn't even get into at all, but might at a later date) is potentially limitless! It's kind of fun, to me at least, and could be funny to others as well! Yeah, jokin' about Wikipedia. Good stuff.
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