I say militant because for an encyclopaedia that ‘anyone can edit’, there is a surprising number of ‘edit wars’ and moderation exercises, and surprisingly less self-moderation than I would have expected to see.

Your example of F-numbers on Wikipedia seems to follow what I’ve observed, generally: the geeky part (the formulae, history and so on) is thorough, encyclopaedic and likely kept up to date, while the bit that most people would want is pretty small. It’s also worth noting that it’s that last part where someone new to the concept of F-numbers would be looking for, as a general introduction to what they are and what they do, and would hang around for the meat if they were interested.

Therein, really, lies the problem. Sure, you have companies putting up information about their products but by and large, the information epicentres of the Internet – the hobbyist blogs, and all of the wikis (and related type sites) out there – are populated by people who just add that information in their spare time.

They may not be industry experts. They’re probably not good copy-writers. But they are passionate about it, which is how it makes it up there in the first place. So far, so good. But passion only takes you so far – it doesn’t take much before life gets in the way and the hobby has to be put on hold, which means the maintenance cycle and updating and fact-checking may not happen promptly if at all.

Now, on something like Wikipedia, it’s not that easy to find a page that hasn’t been updated in a while and usually it happens because of the above: the one or two people that looked after it had, for whatever reason, let it go.

That’s the main problem that we discussed originally: that there’s so much information out there put up by hobbyists that goes out of date so quickly, and there’s no process by which to review that information.

Similarly (and more relevant to me) F-number (cameras) goes into all sorts of formulae, history and why it does what it does. The practical application is a small picture and a bit of very buried text.

Consequently, the whole notion of natural material construction is actually more appealing, for exactly the reason you mention – by making it easier and cleaner to actually dispose of a given item.

Linking current information is usually problematic because of what has become known as ‘link rot’, where links die over time as sites disappear off the net due to the author getting fed up and moving on, or where links get updated due to a software change and there’s a logistical break in getting from the old to new content.

The problem is that most people are simply not that thorough, and are always chasing what’s new rather than making sure there are good resources for already out there, and Wikipedia is not necessarily the best resource, simply because anyone can edit it – more than once I’ve thought about encyclopaedic resources that I wanted to see that weren’t managed by committee but a small, select group of trusted editors. At least that way, there’s a chance the sites will be kept up to date and well moderated etc.

I find that a lot of sites, in an attempt to be ‘New, hip and relevant’ tend to ignore information that doesn’t change, assuming that someone else somewhere probably already has it written up. This is likely true, but I find that re-linking current info is more of a plague.

In the rare instance where I’m talking about a specific lens, camera or even generation of cameras that is likely to become out of date, I’ll usually throw in the qualifier of ‘Currently, as per the date of this article…’

Which isn’t to say that metal doesn’t rust and plastic is invincible either. It just means that you’d have to engineer the bamboo bike to make it easier to replace frame as needed. That, or treat them with horrible chemicals to retard decomposition.

I’ve been amusing myself since the roll-out by watching people huff off, vowing never to return, and I’m just waiting to see how long it takes before some of them do…