Recently I wanted to know more about Jean d'Ormesson. You know. The member of the Académie Française since 1973 and author of dozens of books, one of the more important French authors the last sixty years. Logically, I went to Wikipedia. English Wikipedia has an article of 5,775 bytes about him. To get a little more information I went to French Wikipedia, which has a much bigger article with 31,755 bytes. I read it, and re-read it, and then my mind drifted off. Suddenly there was something I wanted to know about The Simpsons. You know. That American cartoon. The Simpsons article is 122,973 bytes, four times as big as the article about d'Ormesson on French Wikipedia and more than twenty times bigger than d'Ormesson's article on English Wikipedia.
This is a cartoon, we are talking about. A television cartoon, and there is apparently twenty times more interesting things to write about it than there is about the life of an 88 year living French classic author. At least in English.
Admittedly d'Ormesson is not English and not all his books have been translated to English. So what about an English author, like Julian Barnes, winner of the Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the David Cohen prize and many others? His Wikipedia article is 18,366 bytes long - a seventh of The Simpson's article.
But that is not all. There are 45 articles about different Simpson characters and more than 500 for different Simpson episodes. Not even a dozen of Julian Barnes' books got their own Wikipedia on English Wikipedia.
I do not know what this says about Wikipedia editors, about our society and its priorities or the mechanisms behind sharing information.
But it is clear that anyone who thinks that Wikipedia already contains all needed and relevant information is much mistaken.
This is a cartoon, we are talking about. A television cartoon, and there is apparently twenty times more interesting things to write about it than there is about the life of an 88 year living French classic author. At least in English.
Admittedly d'Ormesson is not English and not all his books have been translated to English. So what about an English author, like Julian Barnes, winner of the Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the David Cohen prize and many others? His Wikipedia article is 18,366 bytes long - a seventh of The Simpson's article.
But that is not all. There are 45 articles about different Simpson characters and more than 500 for different Simpson episodes. Not even a dozen of Julian Barnes' books got their own Wikipedia on English Wikipedia.
I do not know what this says about Wikipedia editors, about our society and its priorities or the mechanisms behind sharing information.
But it is clear that anyone who thinks that Wikipedia already contains all needed and relevant information is much mistaken.
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