Longtime readers of this — David Boles, Blogs — publication machine know I have always held a deep-rooted hatred of Wikipedia because of its provocative, and well-documented, willy-nilly publication history, and its ongoing stigma of defacing, and not defending, the public record; and now, after my page was recently deleted, my original notions about Wikipedia stand in even harder evidence today.
Does the “York News-Times” look like a fake news website — playing off the history of the venerable “New York Times” — a newspaper that has been in publication since 1851? The York News-Times is actually a hundred-year-old newspaper publishing from York, Nebraska — a platte of 7,700 people in the Mid-South center of the state that has had a local newspaper since 1883.
If we need more evidence the world is imploding on its own good misdeeds, we need look no further than the weight of the ridiculousness that the Urban Dictionary is now being used in courts of law to define colloquial phrases and to help educate judges and juries as to “meaning in the street.”
We loathe Wikipedia because it is so widely used by students and because it is so easily corrupted with purposeful lies and mistruths. Wikipedia serves mass sycophancy — not secular scholarship — and that is its fatal flaw.
The problem with unrestricted community involvement in online research is the great risk to truth and accuracy in the reporting. If one community member cannot be trusted, then the entire veracity of the rest of the community — guilty or not — is also placed under the microscopic and burning Panopticonic eye of doubt and disingenuousness.
Continue reading → The Deadly Danger of Wikipedia and Corrupt Community Research
Before I reached the age of ten, my father bought for my family a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a purchase I imagine he hoped would push forth our quest for knowledge. Twenty years later, I am one of many online collaborators who contribute to the English Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. True, many of my contributions are extraordinarily minor, but it is still a bit of improvement that can be appreciated by any user.
Wiki? Wikipedia?
The term ‘Wiki’ comes to us from Hawaii, where it is part of what is known as “pidgin English,” meaning “quick” or “informal.” The English Wikipedia is presently one of the more popular wikis and by far the most popular language for the Wikipedia, with over 600,000 articles available for viewing / editing. The term wiki can also refer to the software that runs the wiki, such as mediawiki, the open source software that runs the English Wikipedia.
Wikis and Open Source Software
I think that years from now when a formal history of wikis are written, it will be obligatory to mention open source software. I don’t think that wikis would exist today were it not for open source software. For one, I am pretty sure that just about every piece of wiki software that presently exists is open source. More importantly, the very notion of collaborative editing was most likely inspired, to some extent, by open source software.
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