User:El Sandifer/Wikifailures

Sometimes the Wiki process blows it. Often it's because of a core of well-meaning editors who have an excessive invetsment in a topic, or, more often, one particular facet of a topic gain control of an article. What's always particularly strange about these articles is that people know they're crap. Anyone who looks at them can see that they're crap, they're publicly discussed in IRC and on wiki-en as crap, the talk page is full of people saying they're crap, and yet they stay the way they are. Why? Because the people who would fix them don't or can't commit the time and energy to the frustrating process of arguing out their points with the well-meaning but misguided. As a result, these articles get worse and worse, and become the blindspots of the wikiprocess - things where if a flock of editors were to decend on them, they'd fix, but lacking any such flock, the volume of the editors who broke the article holds sway over the quiet of sense and reason. Occasionally this fixes when a major news source complains about the low quality of an article. Mostly, it just festers and makes us look bad.

Jacques Derrida
Has completely abandoned all sense of being of use to a generalist - the article is actually fabulously written, but it's an MA thesis, not an Encyclopedia article. It's far too dependent on comparatively minor work, while giving little attention to Derrida's main accomplishments, and definitions of concepts are prone to being in terms of other jargon, making the whole thing impenetrable.

2004 U.S. presidential election controversy and irregularities
And all associated sub-articles are 60,000 words generated mostly immediately after the election from partisan news sources and blogs. They lack balance, are grotesquely overlong and selectively focused, have no sense of editorial restraint in what they cite, and are primarily controlled by editors who are so fond of them in their current form that they refuse to allow dispute tags to sit on the articles. Meanwhile, the mailing list discussion on them almost universally confirmed their wretchedness. I think, honestly, that these articles are the single least reputable thing on Wikipedia, and I suspect that when a major news source picks up on them, we are going to be rightly a laughingstock for a news cycle or two.