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Can Wikipedia be Fixed?
- onion2k 14y agoI think of Wikipedia as a jumping off point. By starting out searching Wikipedia to learn a few terms about a topic, I can go out to the wider web or a library to research in more depth quicker and more efficiently. It's a "Cliff's Notes" for everything. In that regard, Wikipedia isn't broken. If you want Wikipedia to be a canonical, verifiable source of all human knowledge then I don't think it could ever work. It'd be impossible to corral all the experts to working on the same platform (even assuming one platform could work for everything).
- ZeroGravitas 14y agoBasically this is a demand for "certainty theatre", where they don't care if Britannica is wrong, they just want some warm glow that comes from the sense that someone, someone in "authority", is doing something, even if some part of them knows it's ineffective, pointless, expensive and inconvenient (in fact probably the more expensive and inconvenient to them the better. No pain, no gain). The fact that Wikipedia is right in their face about the fact that what they're reading may not be true and they may have to do some kind of evaluation of what they're being told is, bizarrely, taken as some kind of failing.