[WikiEN-l] Re: Everyone's favorite FUD-master is at it again

Mon Mar 21 05:04:18 UTC 2005

Mark Pellegrini wrote:
> Everyone's favorite FUD-master is at it again --- 
> http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0503200191mar20,1,26199.story?coll=chi-techtopheds-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true 
> 
> /
> /*...*
> / A similar hyperbole surrounds such projects as the Wikipedia, a free 
> online encyclopedia open to all. The Wikipedia's apologists emphasize 
> the great number of volunteers who have taken part in the project and 
> the number of entries they have contributed. They emphasize also the 
> communal nature of the undertaking, in which anyone with a better 
> understanding of a subject, or a bigger ax to grind, can edit what 
> someone else has created. Their prime article of faith is that this 
> openness will inevitably lead to a high level of accuracy and quality.
> ...
> ----------
> Robert McHenry is former editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and is 
> the author of "How to Know."
> 
> /This is the same guy who called us the Faith-based encyclopedia and 
> compared us to a public toilet- 
> http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html
> 
> --Mark

"In each of these examples, a small and self-selected group convinces 
itself not so much that it represents the greater world beyond the 
computer screen but that it is in some ineffable way superior to it, 
that it has transcended the need for the hard lessons the rest of us 
have learned about how things actually work."

Can anyone say irony? The Encyclopedia Britannica uses an even smaller 
number of people to write their articles. Through the years, the EB has 
proven wrong in many of their editions. That they are more correct in 
their latest works shows that they have the same issues as Wikipedia.

TBSDY