Aug 7, 200602:29 PMThe Life

Wikipedia: Your truth or mine?

Aug 7, 2006 - 02:29 PM
Found in a recent issue of The New Yorker: Stacy Schiff's Know It All - Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?:

[...] Wikipedia is an online community devoted not to last night's party or to next season's iPod but to a higher good. It is also no more immune to human nature than any other utopian project. Pettiness, idiocy, and vulgarity are regular features of the site. Nothing about high-minded collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing invites abuse. Senators and congressmen have been caught tampering with their entries; the entire House of Representatives has been banned from Wikipedia several times. (It is not subtle to change Senator Robert Byrd's age from eighty-eight to a hundred and eighty. It is subtler to sanitize one's voting record in order to distance oneself from an unpopular President, or to delete broken campaign promises.) Curiously, though, mob rule has not led to chaos. [...]

[more wikiness]

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