Wikipedia will soon be eleven years old. It was founded on January 15, 2001 and since then has grown to be the primary source of material for lazy journalists.
The scope of articles is phenomenal, if disturbing. Alongside the topics you would expect from an encyclopedia - the natural world, history and so on - are the stranger peccadilloes of the Internet. Nothing is of too little importance, despite the attempts of editors to remove some of the chaff.
You can tell that the site has only been active for the last decade, and that some contributors have too much time on their hands, by looking any article on a living person.
Earlier today, I read the article about Adam Ant, for a "Musical Youth" post to come. The parts covering his initial tentative fame and early 80s heyday are detail enough, with detail comparable to that you might expect from a general history of British music. It also covers his move to America, acting roles and some further musical work. This neatly brings his story to the early 2000s, and Wikipedia.
The space devoted to his life since then is equivalent to that covering everything before.
His court appearance and sectioning are documented, as you might expect. The more recent activity is not. It is beyond meticulous, in the realm of obsessive. The section for his 2011 UK tour is exhaustively detailed - split into two parts - with no gig review too minor to be excluded.
If newspapers are the first draft of history, Wikipedia may be the rough cut.
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