Overcoming bias

Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult. December 11, 2007.

"Cade Metz at The Register recently alleged that a secret mailing list of Wikipedia's top administrators has become obsessed with banning all critics and possible critics of Wikipedia. Including banning a productive user when one administrator - solely because of the productivity - became convinced that the user was a spy sent by Wikipedia Review. And that the top people at Wikipedia closed ranks to defend their own. (I have not investigated these allegations myself, as yet. Hat tip to Eugen Leitl.)

Is there some deep moral flaw in seeking to systematize the world's knowledge, which would lead pursuers of that Cause into madness? Perhaps only people with innately totalitarian tendencies would try to become the world's authority on everything..."

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/every-cause-wan.html

The flaw isn't so much a moral one as an architectural one, with respect to the regulation of the process of building and maintaining an up-to-date, reliable, accurate, and comprehensive knowledge base.

What we cavalierly call "knowledge" encompasses more than an epistemologically unassailable compendium of scientifically proven views.

Knowledge morphs into impressions, opinions, misconceptions, beliefs, and myths. The introduction of varying degrees of doubt and uncertainty into the knowledge base transforms the enterprise from an objective process into one modulated by the vicissitudes of subjective, affect-driven organizational learning. There are exemplary models of Learning Organizations where these dynamics are well regulated.

Alas, Wikipedia, under its adopted architectural design, is not one of them.