On 30 Jun 2006 at 21:26, Carl Dershem wrote: > Wikipedia is useful for some things, and completely useless for > others. > In areas where there is very little reason to monkey with what's > posted (often technical articles) it's not bad. But whenever it comes > to biography, history, and the like, there are far too many out there > with an ox to gore, an axe to grind, or a personal problem of another > kind.
This is simply not true. Mechanisms are in place to prevent such kinds of "revert wars." I recently examined the history of a controversial article, and it was a horrid mess *in the past* but a consensus had been reached that resulted in an excellent and balanced article, more balanced than any other Web source on the subject I've found. Wikipedia articles on controversial subjects need to be interpreted by the reader which means examining the discussion and even the history of the article. Printed encyclopedias by comparison are quite impoverished in their resources to help the reader interpret the printed text, as there's no access given to the discussion around the article or to the history of revisions. There are bad and inaccurate articles in printed encyclopedias, but, unlike the Wikipedia, there's no chance of fixing that, and no way for the reader to figure that out. In my opinion, the Wikipedia is an excellent and reliable general source of information. Naturally, it does not replace specialised references (like New Grove), but it is accessible and remarkably reliable. But it does require some degree of skepticism on the part of the reader. The dirty little secret that Wikipedia reveals is that one should be equally skeptical of *printed* encyclopedias. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
