The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia, Chronicle of Higher Education Options

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The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia

Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)

By Timothy Messer-Kruse • For the past 10 years I've immersed myself in the details of one of the most famous events in American labor history, the Haymarket riot and trial of 1886. Along the way I've written two books and a couple of articles about the …

[EricBarbour]

Just a minor followup:

Here are the schmucks on Metafilter discussing the Messer-Kruse affair.

Wikipedia editors don't have any means to distinguish the minority expert that's correcting a majority error from the minority expert that's actually a moonbat crank. The only reasonable WP policy is to defer to the majority expert consensus, and sometimes that's going to be wrong, but they don't have any other defense mechanism against cranks trying to use Wikipedia to promote fringe theories.

There are a lot of times when Wikipedia editors are dogmatic bureaucratic idiots, but this isn't one of them.
posted by 0xFCAF at 5:11 PM on March 3 [21 favorites]

(IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/yecch.gif)

[lilburne]

Just a minor followup:

Here are the schmucks on Metafilter discussing the Messer-Kruse affair.

Wikipedia editors don't have any means to distinguish the minority expert that's correcting a majority error from the minority expert that's actually a moonbat crank. The only reasonable WP policy is to defer to the majority expert consensus, and sometimes that's going to be wrong, but they don't have any other defense mechanism against cranks trying to use Wikipedia to promote fringe theories.

There are a lot of times when Wikipedia editors are dogmatic bureaucratic idiots, but this isn't one of them.
posted by 0xFCAF at 5:11 PM on March 3 [21 favorites]

(IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/yecch.gif)

That was good enough for me to go to the trouble of recalling my old password there.
http://www.metafilter.com/113495/What-did-...se-days#4221526