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]

Segue … ???

Vipul,

It's your blog — and it's titled "What Is Research?" — I may be reading a lot of my lifelong interests into that, so let me know if I stray too far off target with my personal projections.

For a lot of folks who are recurrently hopeful that the right marriage of society and technology might just carry humane wisdom over the threshold of the terrible infant that its lowest common denominator labors to deliver in the pregnant present, Wikipedia is just the latest cloud on the horizon of our once bright aspirations.

So we keep asking:

— Is that all there is?
— How did it come to this?
— Dare we hope to do better?

Comment by Jon Awbrey — March 2, 2009 @ 7:06 pm