Richard M. Daley will leave office next year as one of the most famous mayors in modern America, but you wouldn’t know it by the paltry looks of his Wikipedia page.
Considering his political legacy and two decades of service, Daley’s Wikipedia biography is, well, rather unimpressive. This dearth of words has even been noted by Wikipedians themselves.
“I’m new to Chicago,” one commenter wrote on a Wikipedia discussion forum about the mayor, “but it seems to me that this article is unusually brief and lacking much in the way of specifics (biography, policies, controversies) for an article on a prominent and sometimes controversial politician who has been in office for nearly two decades.”
Indeed. The Daley entry, which made its Wikipedia debut on Feb. 25, 2004, has the heft of one for Springfield backbencher’s. Last month, prior to Daley’s announcement that he would not seek re-election, the page received 11,878 views, according to Wikipedia’s statistics. The page’s heaviest traffic month to date was December 2008, right after Barack Obama had been elected president and former Gov. Rod Blagojevich had been arrested.
Several items have been removed from the page over the years, including deep-dive analyses of voter turnout and the mention of an anti-Daley graffiti tagging crew, which was scrubbed for being “unencyclopedic and an attack.”
As of Friday afternoon, his entry stood at just 2,024 words, 225 (or just over 20 percent) of which focused on his recent announcement that he would not run. This pales in comparison to other high-profile mayors like New York’s Michael Bloomberg (6,484 words), Los Angeles’ Antonio Villaraigosa (4,854 words) and San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom (3,362 words). Also topping Daley are U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (8,808), who has a separate 330-word entry on his electoral history; Illinois’ senior Sen. Dick Durbin (3,681); and the state’s junior senator, Roland Burris (3,913).
Daley’s entry does, however, top that of Gov. Pat Quinn, whose life and times have been boiled down to 1,697 words.
The graffiti was unencyclopedic? So is wikipedia! If I want to learn about Daley, I’m perfectly capable of going to a real, edited, published encyclopedia written by experts. Only a fool would trust the musings and biases of a bunch of strangers on the internet. One’s source is only as good as the skills of the person(s) who wrote it. Most wikipedia entries are written by individuals who have yet to master Standard Written English. Why would I trust them to have even basic research skills or to know how to write an objective encyclopedia article? Wikipedia is the first resort of the lazy.
Try to find another encyclopedia that has 3 million articles in English.
Most of the content is written by about 150,000 people, a lot of them experts in their field. Articles must grow and evolve and it might take years for it to fully advanced and have well-cited text.
What is Standard Written English?