[WikiEN-l] Tearing down the Chinese Firewall

Mon May 15 18:44:40 UTC 2006

"Raphael Wegmann"  wrote
>> The main purpose of Wikipedia can be defined as a (new) kind of 
>> publishing,
>> namely putting high quality and informative and neutral, factual articles
>> into the public domain, under the GFDL.  That is what we do.  This is not
>> propaganda.
>
> That's what Wikipedia pretends to do according to the policies.
> I've believed that myself until I've found out, that administrators
> block editors they disagree with.

This might be considered an application of 'falsus in uno falsus in omnibus' 
([[List of Latin phrases (F-O)]]), to argue that if you could find anything 
propagandistic in the English Wikipedia, that makes all 1130000 pages 
propagandistic.  Of course that misunderstands.  It is quite understandable, 
psychologically, why such arguments are brought up (this is hardly the first 
time).  Someone with a specialised interest scrutinises our coverage, and 
sees something they reckon is flawed.

But that is not an argument on the purpose of the encyclopedia.  It merely 
says that it is not finished.  We know that.

Charles 