This raises interesting issues, but i don’t think it reveals any crucial weakness in Wikipedia as a model for knowledge production. More like a weakness of the internet (i.e. networked society) more broadly.

The more interesting comparison of “quality” is not between the two John Locke entries in Wikipedia, but between the John Locke entries on Wikipedia and other encyclopedias–a battle that Wikipedia will easily “win”, if it hasn’t already. (i’m not much of a lockeian scholar, so i won’t bother trying to answer that…).

I frankly don’t care if there’s a long entry of some popular phenomenon. Wikipedia’s resources (server space and bandwith) are effectively unlimited, so the battle of the John Lockes is not a zero-sum game, as it would have been in the era of bookshelf encyclopedias written by experts earning wages.

Given the explosion of popularity poker has seen over the last few years, it seems rather remarkable that there are only 1,400 words on it.

Does the much larger word count for “Magic: the gathering” indicate we have a geek bias in the pop culture comps that must be accounted for?

The poker site is a little misleading because there are so many related sites like Poker strategy, Poker tournaments, etc.

The Gray’s/Grey’s Anatomy one is my fav.

Relative size only matters if there is a finite constraint on the total size. Online, you could have the world’s best Transformers article, and it doesn’t detract or squeeze out the rest in any way.

While this may be a fun game, in reality the word count does not reflect on the most important matter, that of the quality of the article. Just because one article is more concise than another does not mean it is any less informative, factual, or useful. Additionally, such measures have only taken into account ONE article on a topic, specifically the most general one (similar point as Mike Dover’s). Though the poker article is much shorter than the Magic article, the _topic_ of poker also encompasses several other articles, such as the article for Texas Hold’em and the article of Hand rankings, which aggregated could be longer and more useful.