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The Spectacle Blog
Earlier this week, Robert
McHenry offered fairly devastating criticism of Wikipedia
in this article. Having been Editor in
Chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica, McHenry argues effectively:
Feeling out what the standards are in the new internet medium has been tough, but McHenry is emphatic that it's not to be found in Wikipedia's structure, which allows just anyone to edit according to whim. With veterans like McHenry and, earlier, John Siegenthaler, it began to look like a debate between new and old school, at least in the popular media. But now Tycho at Penny Arcade has offered his viewpoint. (Be sure to check out the comic strip, which, no pun intended, is an excellent illustration of the problems Wikipedia suffers.) Tycho has expounded at length about his disdain for the so-called "visionaries" who claim they were part of some underground that now has been utterly sold out to the mainstream -- people who think that "everything has changed" in light of
Reponses to criticism of Wikipedia go something like this: the first is usually a paean to that pure democracy which is the project's noble fundament. If I don't like it, why don't I go edit it myself? To which I reply: because I don't have time to babysit the
Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions. The fact of the matter is that all sources of information are not of equal value, and I don't know how or when it became impolitic to suggest it. In opposition to the spirit of Wikipedia, I believe there is such a thing as expertise.
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More Blog Posts by J.P. Freire
http://spectator.org/blog/2005/12/16/even-more-on-wikipedia
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