QUOTE(dogbiscuit @ Wed 10th March 2010, 7:16am)
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.
There's always a tension between central and local control in any system. The decision of how much control to centralize vs. distribute, is impossible to make, since it's sort of a traveling salesman problem, but even harder. Worse still, in real life, such things are decided by "authority", which is central-by-definition, so even the meta-decision for deciding whether to shift decisions to central command vs. "foreward" command, is sticky, and tends to work well in one direction (toward centralization of authority), but not the other. Which is a shame.
The US, whose opinion on government you comment on, is a comparitively young country, and the farther west you go on the continent, the "younger" it gets (till you get to the west coast, where it starts to look a bit more eastern again). You can look at firearms ownership and carry laws as a proxy for that. At least half of US states allow concealed carry of pistols by citizens with no criminal record and varying amounts of training, but the two states that probably never will allow this are New York and California. The country is more leftist and urban on the coasts, and it gets more libertarian and conservative where the population (historically) thinned out in the heartland, and people had to live without good government contact more recently. This is not a minor phenomenon-- when the population in these interior mid-southern parts of the country filled in, those people managed to elect a lot of Republicans-- people who distrust government on principle, except when it's going to war against some other country.
The amount of residual self-directiveness of populations shows up most clearly in emergencies and in combat, in situations when central command almost always breaks down at some point, and you're left to see how the system self-organizes (if it can) and how well it does. I've seen citizens working alongside cops and firemen and paramedics in emergencies, delivering emergency care, medical care, and sometimes even law enforcement.
In WW II I know something of the combat history of Americans, and one of the things that stands out is how difficult it was to decapitate American forces by killing their commanders. In case after case when officers went down, and communications were broken, new commanders not only took over from the junior officers, but in many cases from the enlisted men. Nor did loss of central command stop fighting. Rather than dig in and/or give up, there are case after case where the enlisted men organized, solved local problems, and sometimes simply headed toward the sound of battle, all by themselves. (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif) In the history of warfare this is not all that common. In very many actions such stuff made a huge difference for the Americans, whose kill-ratio wasn't *entirely* due to their superior supply-state.
It happens in all armies of course, but it's far more common in armies from countries that have recently had frontiers and the gun-toting people who came from them-- Australia, Canada, the US, and so on. As those countries grow older, the people from them will probably grow more "effete" and less able to solve their own problems when "authority" is missing. Australia and Canada are well down that road already, and I've watched the process happen to the US, even in my lifetime. (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/yecch.gif) Adult people standing around waiting to be told what to do, always signals a failure of society of some kind. If nobody's giving you orders, you should be looking around to see what you can do on your own, and the hell with the government's policies. If something needs doing right now and can't wait, and there's nobody from the government to do it, that's their problem. If they show up later and compain about what you did to fix things, tough shit. Most Americans feel they should have been on the spot when needed, and if not, they give up their right to grouse. That also is far from a universal attitude.
All this actually applies to Wikipedia. Good or bad, there a reason it wasn't invented in the UK or Germany. They copied it once it got going, but the audacity of it, good or bad, is characteristically American. It's got "Invented in the US" (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/huh.gif) (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/blink.gif) written all over it.
The Web Is Making People Stupid, TWIMPS And Getting TWIMPSER
Jon Awbrey The Web Is Making People Stupid 
