Wikipedia criticism, and why it fails to matter, vipulnaik Options

[Kato]

http://whatisresearch.wordpress.com/2009/0...ails-to-matter/

"Over the past few months, I’ve been collecting newspaper and magazine articles about the phenomenon of Wikipedia. (I’ve myself written two blog posts on Wikipedia here and here). Prominent among the Wikipedia critics is Seth Finkelstein, a consulting programmer who does technology journalism on the side and publishes columns in the Guardian. Seth’s criticism is largely related to the politics of getting people to work for free. The Register has published many news and analysis articles critical of Wikipedia, such as this, this, this, and many others. The Register points out the many flaws in Wikipedia’s editing system, and has been critical of what it terms the cult of Wikipedia."

This guy also writes:

Of course, this hardly completes the list of Wikipedia critics. There’s Wikipedia Watch and Wikipedia Review, both started by Daniel Brandt, a confirmed Wikipedia critic. There’s Robert McHenry, former Britannica editor-in-chief, who has written pieces critical of Wikipedia such as this and this. And there’s the self-described anti-Web-2.0 polemicist Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. One of the Wikipedia-critical pieces that often gets quoted is Digital Maoism: The hazards of the new online collectivism by Jaron Lanier.

Wikipedia Review started by Daniel Brandt? News to me.

[Jon Awbrey]

[Repost. Hmmm, the Word-O-Press Bot seems to be rejecting any post where I link to my Wikipedia Review profile — I hope it's not using the Wik-I-Pedia MetaBadList as a censor or something like that.]

Somey Says, “I’m afraid Jon is right —”

Be afraid, be very afraid …

But seriously folks, let’s look at this from the perspective of an Educational Systems Designer. (I happen to know people with degrees in just that.)

What we’ve got here is a transitional object that is going through a transitional phase. I have reason to hope that it’s a brief transition, but that depends on your time frame. Depending on your scope and what aspects of the system you choose to inspect, some of the features of this design paradigm have been ruling the day, perhaps every other day, for only the last 60 years, the last 20 years, or the last 5 years, again, it all depends on what you are looking at.

Another hair that needs splitting is the one I mentioned in regard to Usenet — there is the autonomous dynamics of the system in its own reich and then there is the impact that it has on our everyday lives and greater enterprises. Gestalt dynamics is such that some part of the minimally attended Ground can always go Figure again — sometimes suddenly and sometimes unpleasantly, so we have to watch out for that — but time after time some things we once cared a whole lot about just fade away and never trouble our whirried mind again.

My question is — How does our grasp of dynamic systems need to evolve in order for us to take these contextual, hermeneutic, interpretive, or pragmatic factors into account in decidedly more sensible ways than we have in the past?

Comment by Jon Awbrey — February 26, 2009 @ 2:45 pm

[Kato]

Good work Jon.