[WikiEN-l] One reason why Wikipediais not presently classroom-safe

Mon Feb 21 13:51:06 UTC 2005

John Lee wrote

> ...when we get
> to the point of having to debate with the readers, you know something is
> wrong.

That may be.

"Imagine a world in which every person has free access
to the sum of all human knowledge."

That is currently what we are using, successfully, to raise funds.

I think all of us here would want to qualify that in some way.  The
proposition as stated is not utopian.

But there is nothing there about 'and not have their assumptions
questioned'.  It distances WP, certainly, from kinds of journalism based on
the readership not having their assumptions questioned.

I just mention this, as a comment on the idea that WP is driven by having a
readership, and should have a sort of 'circulation manager' function based
on targeting and retaining the readership.  While the servers are strained
by the numbers of folk wanting to read WP, this is not a live issue, I
think.  For the longer term, yes.  I have already given an alternate slant
on it, in another post.

Charles