Bohgosity BumaskiL <[email protected]> wrote: > Great minds discuss ideas. > Mediocre minds discuss events. > Small minds discuss other people. > --Eleanor Roosevelt
...Which pretty much sums up the problem with Wikipedia: If we can't discuss things at the idea level, we're relegating ourselves to the mediocre and the small. It's a great point - some of the best encyclopedia articles were written not by "experts" - but by people who understood that the import of writing for 'some prestigious encyclopedia' put severe limitations on the BS permitted in their work - hence forcing them to be highly conceptual. But you have to keep in mind the basic fact that - even though there may be about 72 ways by which Wikipedia violates the traditional encyclopedia concept - Wikipedia is still an "encyclopedia." Wiki might make editing faster, but it also makes the publication of BS faster, and that's the real issue that makes wiki something not typically suitable as a research publication medium, or even a research discussion forum. And anyway Wikipedia is still just a pastiche at best - a place where there is no impetus to put forth one's absolute "best work." "Best work" in most contexts involves "creativity" and "eloquence," and these are the very same aspects of intelligence that NOR was created to destroy (on Wikipedia). We might hope though that we could find a way to use Objectivity (NPOV) to deal with just about anything, but that's not likely without rating mechanisms. In any case Wikipedia's greatest export might not even its articles, but rather its objective appoach to treating any subject. Of course we should not credit Rand too much for fathering the development of all objectivity. That would be a skymining fallacy. ;-) -Stevertigo _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
