Argument nexus

A while ago I read a lit­tle arti­cle on wired that described wikipedia arti­cles as argu­ment nexus. The arti­cle itself is not that insight­ful, but that sin­gle idea has always been some­what inter­est­ing to me. It’s cer­tainly not the case with every arti­cle (Boron), but with many pop-culture or inter­net cul­ture top­ics it does have some truth.

I was recently reminded of it look­ing at the arti­cle on Ann Alt­house. A friend of mine is a fan of her’s, so it’s on my watch­list, but I’m not oth­er­wise that involved. It turns out she was recently the sub­ject of a con­tro­versy of some mag­ni­tude in the polit­i­cal blo­gos­phere. The result of this con­tro­versy for wikipedia is that the arti­cle about her is now roughly twice the size. Sup­port­ers and detrac­tors are argu­ing and edit­ing, bal­anc­ing each other out, and in the process stay­ing fairly neu­tral. It’s inter­est­ing to watch the accre­tion occur, and hope­fully after a period of time, it will sta­bi­lize back into a neu­tral, use­ful article.