[tptacek]

The "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" being the banal fact that reporters are sometimes wrong about things?

Have you tried leaving a comment on the Talk page of the article saying that you're Jennifer Tilly's sister, linking to something about you (you're obviously bona fide), and asking for a correction? WP has special reliability rules (WP:BLP) for "Biographies Of Living Persons".

It doesn't look like CMT has a Wikipedia article at all. Should it?

[btilly]

The "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" being the banal fact that reporters are sometimes wrong about things?

Sometimes?

I've yet to read a feature article written by a reporter on a subject that I know well which didn't have multiple mistakes.

Have you tried leaving a comment on the Talk page of the article saying that you're Jennifer Tilly's sister, linking to something about you (you're obviously bona fide), and asking for a correction? WP has special reliability rules (WP:BLP) for "Biographies Of Living Persons".

Actually I am one of the brothers that Wikipedia does not know about.

Back in the 2007-2008 period I decided to make some obvious corrections. They got rejected. I left some comments in talk. A couple of my comments are still there on Jennifer's talk page.

If you want to try to fix the page, you could use http://www.officialmegtilly.com/blog/megs_made_up_muffins/ and http://www.officialmegtilly.com/blog/hell_in_a_hand_basket/ as evidence that Meg has at least one brother that Wikipedia doesn't know about. Good luck getting it changed.

As for CMT, you tell me. It is a civil engineering company that has existed for decades and has a significant presence in multiple states. But there isn't much about them online other than the company website. Which, by definition, is not considered reliable.

[tptacek]

I have it in for the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" (is there even evidence that Gell-Mann believed in it?), but your point is well taken: Wikipedia's rules do heavily privilege journalism, and journalism is merely the first draft of history, not the camera-ready final.

It's possible that Wikipedia has carefully balanced this; if they didn't privilege reporting, a lot fewer articles would get written, about a lot of things people actually do want to look up in the encyclopedia. Reliance on journalism means they'll routinely get some bad facts, but there's a bound on how bad things will be that there wouldn't be if they just got rid of WP:RS altogether.

It's much more likely that nobody has carefully thought about this, and it's just a shambolic volunteer project taking advantage of what they have to work with.

My basic take about Wikipedia is that it's hard to argue with the results. However obnoxious their policies are to nerds like us (and I commented upthread about obnoxious experiences I've had working on it --- I no longer contribute!), it's a tremendously successful project, perhaps one of the most successful in the history of the Internet.

It's bad when they have bad facts, more so when those facts pertain to living people, even more so when someone has the correct facts and can't get them accepted, and especially so when that person is a family member of the subject.

It's less bad, to me at least, that an encyclopedia happens to lack a page, for now, on Apache Arrow.