Daily reddited articles

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trout
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Daily reddited articles

Unread post by trout » Wed Feb 08, 2017 2:06 am

As a change from the featured articles, I thought I'd start "Daily Reddited Articles". As noted somewhere on the forums previously, Reddit is a huge source of Wikipedia traffic.

Today's reddited article is Ching Shih.

While this tale of a pirate woman in 19th century China sounds intriguing, the article rapidly descends into the usual tedious babbling. It starts right away in the lead section:
Ching Shih has been featured in numerous books, novels, video games, and films in Asia.
Wow, books and novels, not to mention VIDEO GAMES.
Cheng I belonged to a family of successful pirates who traced their criminal origins back to the mid-seventeenth century. Following his marriage to Ching Shih, "who participated fully in her husband's piracy",[1]:71 Cheng I used military assertion and his reputation to consolidate a coalition of competing Cantonese pirate fleets into an alliance. By 1804, this coalition was a formidable force, and one of the most powerful pirate fleets in all of China; by this time they were known as the Red Flag Fleet.[1]:71
Disjointed, barely comprehensible babbling is back, and this time it's personal.

The article goes on with this kind of tedious, lazy writing. I'll offer a short sample:
Once she held the fleet's leadership position, Ching Shih started the task of uniting the fleet by issuing a code of laws.[8]:28 The Neumann translation of The History of Pirates Who Infested the China Sea claims that it was Cheung Po Tsai that issued the code.[9] Yuan Yung-lun says that Cheung issued his own code of three regulations, called san-t'iao, for his own fleet, but these are not known to exist in a written form.[5] The code was very strict and according to Richard Glasspoole, strictly enforced.[10]
Noel Coward remarked that television was for appearing on rather than watching. I suppose the people involved in the above prose think that Wikipedia is for writing, rather than reading.