Surprisingly, Wikipedia is behind the curve. The biography hasn't been edited since 27th November. It hasn't had a non-trivial edit since the 22nd. This is surely yet another sign Wikipedia is on a death slide, and perhaps at increasing velocity. It wasn't that long ago that today's developments (national news over here, for obvious reasons) would have produced a flurry of heated debate and edits on Wikipedia. Now, crickets.
While searching, I was also surprised to see Piers Morgan's entry on Britannica is actually pretty high up on Google results. High enough that people who perhaps have no clue who Piers is and want to know because of this latest incident, would see it.
Intrigued, I had a read of it, and was pleased to see there is still a viable alternative to Wikipedia. When the encyclopedia any twat can edit dies, we'll be alright. Because Brittannica is an encyclopedia, a real one, the biography is a short summary. You can read it in a few minutes, and come away with a well rounded view of the man. You can talk about Piers in a social setting, without looking like an ignoramus.
Wikipedia readers, not so much. They're probably not even at that social setting, because they're still indoors, trying to finish the epic tome that is Morgan's Wikipedia entry. An entry which, in a typical example of its absurd length, devotes a small essay's worth of text to the intersection between Trump and Morgan. I'm not saying that's trivial, but it is hardly defining. And for a man who Brittanicca tells us is a highly controversial infernationally famous editor and presenter, is it any surprise he would have had an opinion on Donald Trump?
It is fascinating, the story of Trump and Morgan's relationship, but like 99% of what is on Wikipedia, it is stuff that doesn't need to be in a summary. That can be left to other sources, with readers who are interested, finding It as part of their own further reading. And It's not like Wikipedia is serving as a useful summariser of hard to find or expensive offline sources here, turning secondary sources into a tertiary resource. Every single source in that section is an online primary source, unsurprisingly. All TWENTY of them. No distance. No editorial effort.
The section is typical of Wikipedia's uselessness. It's a disparate collection of factoids, with no summary or biographical context whatsoever. In a remarkable disjoint, although given a whole section, Trump's relevance to Morgan doesn't rate an explanation in the introduction. It offers on the single sentence "In 2008, Morgan won The Celebrity Apprentice US, appearing with future US president Donald Trump."
For the truly curious, Wikipedia cannot even answer a simple question like When did Piers Morgan first meet Donald Trump? The answer is only a Google search away, with a 2021 HuffPo piece confirming that was their first meeting. It goes on to completely summarise the relationship in a handy bitesize quote....
Obviously that's the subject talking about themselves, but a reasonably intelligent person can probably figure out It is a fair and complete summary. No need for Wikipedia "editors" to stick their beaks in, interrupting the natural relationship between readers and journalists.For people like me who liked Trump, who got on with him and known him for a long time, way longer before he was a politician and after, it was incredibly disappointing to see him lose his mind, lose any sense of leadership, and in the end actually inspire a riot against the heart of American democracy,” he said.
“At that point, I was done. That’s it, sorry, I can’t be with someone like that.”
It must absolute infuriate the last few people on Earth who actually read Wikipedia as if it were an enclopedia, to realise Wikipedia cannot do even a basic thing like that. Offer a complete summary of the Trump-Morgan intersection. And If it can't do that, what use is it?
Morons like Hemiauchenia regularly trumpet the supposed benefit of Wikipedia articles tending to be longer than Brittanica entries. Is this what he had in mind? Don't bother asking him, he's too thick to formulate an answer. Hence why he spends his days as a Wikipedia editor and Wikipediocracy stalwart.
Obviously in theory, these flaws could be fixed. If editors got their teeth into this biography and put the necessary effort in to bring it to Feature Article status, it would be far more obvious why the Trump-Morgan relationship needs to be detailed, and it would be summarised and put into context, with basic and obvious things like when they first met being detailed.
And it would be impeccably sourced with an emphasis on sources with sufficient distance. Books! The vast majority of that section deals with stuff that happened five or even ten years ago. And we live in an age where entire books are written about the political events of a year ago.
Wikipedia is dying because the theory hasn't translated into reality. The green shoots of Wikipedia's peak of 2007-8, soon withered and died. There is virtually nobody on Wikipedia willing to put the time and effort in. And morons like Hemiauchenia, people who are absolutely representative of what an established and experienced Wikipedia editor looks like today, couldn't write a Featured Article even if they had a gun to their head.
Hence why Hemiauchenia's user page merely reads "This page intentionally left blank." The theory of Wikipedia was that Wikipedians would use their user page to tell others about themselves and their potential usefulness as a member of a collaborative effort. Hence why, back in the day, this was where editors would list their acheivements, such as the Features Articles they have produced.
Hemiauchenia has no need for a user page. By his own admission, he is on Wikipedia solely because Wikipedia is a place where he can live out his fantasy of being an expert in fossils or some shit. He is allowed to engage in immediate publishing, and nobody bothers him. He literally said that as if it was a good thing! Hemiauchenia would clearly not survive as a Brittanicca contributor, a place where you answer to an editor. A place where expertise means more than an ability to copy-paste.
Scarily, fossils and shit is exactly what one might hope would have been Wikipedia's specialism.
