Another little thought that I had this morning whilst walking the dog was about the complexity of the world and how there is a lot of stuff that is just too hard for people to deal with.
I deal with local planning issues, and you soon submerge into a Looking Glass World of Governmental logic. My local residents association took a specific line on not telling people what to think about a major application and then tried to get the residents to tell it what they thought.
The net result was that the residents association realised that a lot of apparently intelligent people were most aggrieved that they had not done their thinking for the people, or had not magically divined what their obvious opinion was and stepped in to represent it to the local authority as it was clearly obvious what needed to be said.
This got me to thinking that in a complex world, people have got into the habit of delegating their thinking to others, and the Web is just an extension of this - modern issues are far more complex than whether you can get the blacksmith to fix the horse and cart before harvest time, so people continually look for ways to delegate critical thinking that is beyond their knowledgebase to other places. They do not take kindly to this process not producing the right results, (which is even more interesting in the American context where there is a strong disposition to blame governmental bodies simply for existing it seems!).
It is here we get to the Wikipedia part of the problem - Wikipedia has many characteristics that superficially look like it is an authoritative source, so people uncritically delegate their thinking to it.
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