Wikipedia puts the Public at risk in two main ways:- Content. It supplies information-seekers with poor quality information on substantive subject matters.
- Conduct. It hammers the malleable participant into adopting a host of bad habits — poor citizenship, poor critical thinking skills, poor journalistic practices, poor research skills, and poor scholarship.
A few comments about the content issue —
Wikipedia is designed to enforce poor information quality on the content of its articlesWikipediots enforce measures of "quality control" that make a mockery of the very concept — they control the quality, but
downward — they keep the quality of information from rising above the lowest common denominator of the least informed editor's misconceptions about each substantive subject. This method of editing succeeds only on non-substantive subjects, where any ediot can supply sufficient data to fill the page.
Slrubenstein's little manifesto above is a perfect example of this Doctrine Of Unlearning. You're supposed to "unlearn" the meaning of words like
consensus and
truth, to forget all your former sense of the radical difference between them, and to supplant these concepts in your poor, unwashed brain with the "unique meaning" that Wikipediots hallucinate on be½ of their far-less-than-½-baked notion of truth by consensus.
Jon Awbrey
This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: