Back when growing up, my schoolteachers pushed like crazy the idea that Wikipedia was inherently untrustworthy because anyone could edit it. At the same time, w

Back when growing up, my schoolteachers pushed like crazy the idea that Wikipedia was inherently untrustworthy because anyone could edit it. At the same time, we were all going crazy over Google Earth, which was the exact same system, except a for-profit company owned it. Having corrected mistakes before on Google Maps, it seems like there's essentially no moderation at all for most listings. At least with sites like Wikipedia, people will occasionally look at the edits I make. It's strange to me to see community run projects get laughed at sometimes in the mainstream, given that a nontrivial portion of the most successful commercial products out there are essentially crowdsourced community efforts except with worse moderation and higher stake by advertisers. It feels sometimes like the standard is, "trusting random people to contribute data is naive... unless a company then gets to own all of the data. Then it's innovative."