Wikipedia's fanatical transparency (Niagara Falls Review) Options

[Yahoo! News]

As anyone who has gone Googling will tell you, Wikipedia is evolving into the font of all human knowledge. Need an explanation of Einstein's theory of relativity? Curious about who voices those anonymous cameos in the new Simpsons movie?

Article: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/searc...h+talk&classif=

[Jonny Cache]

Journalism : The Oldest Profession

Jonny

[Milton Roe]

Journalism : The Oldest Profession

Jonny

Linda Ellerbee: "Journalism: That profession whose business it is to explain that which it personally does not understand."

A quote which is much funnier when you realize that this is very near to what the official Wikipedia editorical policy is: Don't worry about whether or not the editor making that change understands the subject or not-- it's irrelevant. The only important thing is whether or not the verifiable source he's using is authoritative.

Nevermind that to understand whether or not a sourced statement is authoritative, or even relevant to the statement at hand, you really do need to understand the subject yourself; and thus, if the subject is at all technical, that means you need some subject-matter-expertise to do much more than fix grammer and spelling. Ahem, but for the sake of Wikipedia's 5 pillars, let's just pretend that's not so. Jimbo says it isn't. And since Jimbo is an acknowleged Universal Expert on Epistemology {{fact}}, how can anything Jimbo tells us be nonsense?

[guy]

if the subject is at all technical, that means you need some subject-matter-expertise to do much more than fix grammer and spelling.

Actually, you need a bit of subject knowledge to know whether what you think is a misspelling is in fact a real word. For example, I have no idea whether a grammer is someone who weighs things in grammes.