User:TomReagan90

Deeply unconvinced at this stage by the utility of Wikipedia with regards to contemporary political issues - particularly biographies of political or politicized individuals.

Wikipedia editors seem to make scant distinction between notability and notoriousness, fame and infamy, between success in one's given field versus appearances on daytime television, twitter wars, and/or passing mentions in mass media, blogs, tabloids, etc.

Creating enough such articles (on esteemed journalists/academics in their field) to achieve some semblance of balance with the masses of articles on fringe Twitter-famous "journalists", would take many hundreds of hours of unpaid labor. Which I'm beginning to appreciate is a systemic problem - those people who are most qualified to determine who is most worthy of Wiki bios in contentious political areas, are incredibly unlikely to be the same people willing to spend hundreds of hours editing Wikipedia. More importantly, I have been a journalist and researcher for 11 years and I don't write for unreliable/compromised outlets on the principle that doing so would lend them additional credibility. I'm hardly going to devote hundreds of hours of my free time to composing articles as extensive as the one on say, (redacted), when I fear that doing so would put those esteemed journalists/academics on a level pegging with fringe publicity hungry hacks such as her. At this point, it appears to me that it's better that serious journalists not have their reputations sullied by the appearance of a Wikipedia article under their name, less they be mistaken for twitter celebs. TomReagan90 (talk) 02:01, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

I think the project is gone as far as contentious, controversial issues go. There simply needs to be editorial oversight and fact-checkers for articles such as these (and I haven't even begun to look at topics even more sensitive such as various claims and denials of genocide, etc). Otherwise we have absolute messes like this article, which will never be encyclopedic. And there's tonnes of these articles, literally an infinite supply. As soon as someone pops up and goes viral on social media, hits the news, if it's a left/right thing in the US, then immediately an article is produced with greater content and scrutiny than freakin' Montesquieu! Am I the only person who's ever attempted to edit Wikipedia that is bothered by this? Andy Ngo is, according to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, more notable than the guy whose theories literally originated some of the most fundamental principles of the modern constitutional liberal democracy... the freakin' Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu! Unless admins step in, this madness, this slow but steady deterioration of the Wiki Project, will only get worse as mob rule and the "Twitterization" of Wikipedia becomes further entrenched. TomReagan90 (talk) 13:51, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

And I haven't even yet begun to look at the articles about deeply contentious issues themselves (ongoing wars, international territorial disputes, etc). Imagine what fury would be unleashed if I or another new editor who tried to adhere to the most strict principles of editorial objectivity, started to make edits on Chinese politics, or Israel-Palestine? I'm afraid one would get sucked into a rabbit hole that could have a potentially disastrous effect on one's work productivity!.... not to mention sanity.

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