Talk:The Mismeasure of Man/Comments

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I would rate the Wikipedia article on The Mismeasure of Man as it currently stands (11 Aug 2007--but who knows what you'll see whenever you read this?) as quite low. (What scale are we supposed to use? The scale link pointed to an explanation that seems totally unrelated and irrelevant to these solicited comments...) The article strikes me as an archetype of the kind of slanted game-playing that has convinced me it is a waste of time and effort to contribute to Wikipedia. Yes, I could fix the most obvious problems, but my point of view is essentially neutral, so I lack the motivation to worry about untwisting the article on a frequent basis.

Examples? The first sentence begins by focusing the article in a misleading way, mentioning only the first edition of the book (though the second edition is later mentioned in a distracting way, almost as a kind of footnote). In the second sentence, the style is obscure and twisted, with an awkward negative wording that has to be reversed to imply the actual intention of the book as the latest author of the Wikipedia passage is apparently attempting to obscure it. The next paragraph treats craniometry as a metric of intelligence on a par with intelligence testing. In the actual book it was treated as a minor and equally discredited branch of phrenology--which was selected as a focal topic precisely because it was once widely accepted and is now regarded as bunkum. Phrenology itself is not mentioned anywhere in the article. IQ testing was a much higher focus, but it gets slighted here as the intro wanders off... I read the first edition of the book fairly recently and have clear memory of it, but this article seems to be talking about some other book, one that 'just accidentally' is much more suitable for criticism and dismissal.

I admire the goals of Wikipedia, but I think this article is yet another example of how the Wikipedia project is failing to reach them. Shanen 23:43, 10 August 2007 (UTC)