On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 7:03 PM, Charles Matthews < [email protected]> wrote:
> Andrew Gray wrote: > > "Like Boiling a Frog", David Runciman. > http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n10/runc01_.html > > > > >From the last issue of the London Review of Books, a long and chewy > > article about Wikipedia; generally positive, though it draws attention > > to the problems of writing quality and "recentism". There's a review > > of Andrew Lih's book buried somewhere in it, too... > > > > > "... encyclopedias have been made better by the advent of the internet, > but newspapers have been made worse: the cumulative impact of the > readers’ comments that can now be appended online to almost any article > tends to diminish most forms of human understanding." > > Worth reading for that insight alone. I think what's interesting here is asking: how does Wikipedia harness the energy of the public (for want of a better word) in a way that can be more productive, useful (or at least less brain-sporkingly nonsensical) than a newspaper open comment section does? What is it about this way of working - this mode of production - that works well? And what is afforded by 'open commenting' that the wiki model doesn't? (I don't we should overly idealise the wiki model - I'm sure we've all sporked our brains out over on-wiki affairs at some stage or another.) But I was struck by how in the LRB review of Andrew's book, the reviewer singled out the collaboratively-written afterword as better written than Andrew's book, which he found "full of interest but rather indulgent, containing too much incidental detail about people Lih wants to please." I can't imagine Andrew is fully happy about that (!) - but it's an interesting take. Cormac _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
