obscenity
Title: Obscenity
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity
The article on obscenity was started on September 24, 2002, with about 500 contributions to date (not sure how many contributors- sorry not counting). It deals with obscenity law
I chose this article because I’ve done some research into obscenity law in the past so I felt I could make a reasonable judgment on the accuracy of the content.
Surprisingly, the most controversial part of writing about obscenity was the role of a dictionary definition in a Wikipedia article. The rebuttle between two users got particularly nasty, and stuffy
One user copied and pasted a definition of obscenity from an outside source without citing it. This comment was left: “The following was removed from the article, because Wikipedia is not a dictionary”
^ I’m not sure if it was Wikipedia who did the removing or not
“Wikipedia may not be a dictionary, but there is nothing wrong with including a definition within an article!” – User A
“Indeed, Wikipedia articles should begin with a good definition. Ideally it should be written as a plain English prose sentence, and not contain dictionary-only stuff like parts of speech, extraneous senses, old usage citations, and such” – User B
Another user went on about how the word should have been defined, and User A became flustered and replied with “rewrite it then!”
It seems that Wikipedia users hold each other accountable not only for accuracy but also for grammar and prose. We’ve got some elite editors going on!
As far as accuracy there had been some pretty blatant errors in the article, and one was addressed in the discussion and removed. The material on court cases regarding obscenity concurred with what I knew about the issue, but I would need more information to judge the sections on other countries’ obscenity laws.
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