Concluding Unsympathetic PostscriptQUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ 18 May 2009)
For my part, Wikipedia represents the antithesis of everything that I've learned about education, ethics, information, research, and scholarship over a lifetime of inquiry.
Is there good content in Wikipedia? Sure. I put some there myself and so have many other people of good will — people who are as naive today as I was once — but I have seen how quickly that quality degrades over time as people of experience get chased off or worn down to tears.
But here is one thing you should not forget — all of that good content is parasitic on prior traditions of research and scholarship that the Wiki-Parasite is destroying as quickly as it feeds off its Host.
In my own education I learned that there is a lot more to Knowledge than accumulating a Fact Dump, that the facts of the day rot and decay without living traditions of inquiry to supply and sustain them. The disciplines of analysis and experimentation, the methods of inference and proof, the procedures of research and scholarship must not be short-circuited and shunted to one side in the rush to deliver a product.
I do not know, and do not care, if Ben Franklin counts as Left-Wing or Right-Wing these days, but he comprehended better than most that the viability of a democratic society crucially depends on a Public that is well-educated and well-informed. Wikipedia founds itself on falsehoods, and no good can come of that in the end. It puts our whole way of life at risk.
Jon Awbrey (18 May 2009), Volokh Conspiracy Blog
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