[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

Sat Oct 2 19:53:22 UTC 2010

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 02, 2010 7:52 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

> Wikipedia does appear to have fallen into its own folk ontology: an
> answer to the question "what is knowledge?" that is simple and obvious
> enough for smart high school students. And I'm not meaning to
> denigrate smart high school students - but they haven't even had four
> years of wrangling with the issue of "how do we know what we know?" at
> undergraduate level.

David could you translate this section here please.  Are you saying that the 
question of what 'knowledge' that the WMF seeks to bring is a difficult 
question?  Also, be careful not to confuse the content of what is to be 
known with the medium through which it is acquired.  For example if I 
explain x in a very simple way that anyone can understand, and if I explain 
x using very technical way, the knowledge x is the same in both cases.  It's 
just that in one case it has explained in an easier way.  We aren't talking 
about different knowledge here. 