Saw this video over at TechCrunch: The Truth About Wikipedia. The gist of it is that truth and fact are not "democractic" as Wikipedia would have it, and that neglecting expert insight in favor of amateur contributions is a mistake.
As usual I'm somewhere in the middle: I think there is value in allowing anyone and everyone to contribute what they believe is fact to a single compendium of information. The problem lies in the requirement thereafter to be intensely critical of what we retrieve from such a source, especially where we can't examine the credentials of the contributor and judge whether or not they're full of crap. The danger of course is that we are not critical enough, and take for fact something that is an opinion, a joke, a typo, or a deliberate attempt to mislead.
What are your thoughts?
1 comment:
I only go to wikepedia if I need a general idea about something, usually something wierd that I don't care much about. If it's important I look for something more credible. Wikipedia is full of crap I'm sure.
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