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This is from the Wikipedia article on Database Management Systems. What were the authors of this actually trying to say? What does it mean to “dramatically affected the thought of database management systems”? If database management is freed of “monolithic entities”—in quotations in the original, mind—to what brave future do we now look? Has the ever been a time when more options—which options?—has not produced “flexibility”, presumably here defined tautologically as having more options? The use of a date lends false historical authenticity, but to what? Which researchers and where are their papers? The only reference is to a paper given in 2008, a decade after the supposed watershed 1998.

The full article itself has several more problems, recognized in a passive way by a header on the article. I have no comprehensive critique of the Wikipedia to give, only an idle weariness not sufficient to overcome any possible distaste in an edit war—I do wish that Wikipedia articles of less than stellar quality were given less prominence in search engine traffic and Wikipedia’s own graph structure. Arguably, this would harm anonymous, impulses edits in a system seemingly designed to incorporate and mutate this style of writing into a tome passably constructed, harm the Wikipedia’s ability to improve with time. I wonder, has it improved and by what metric? With the full edit history available to any and all, answering that question is a matter of choosing the metric and buying the computer time.

I wager that while the size of Wikipedia’s corpus has grown, its excellence in technical subjects has decreased. In my experience, this has been the case in Computer Science and Mathematics articles.

(The emphasis of “database management” is my own.)