This illustrates one of the reasons why Wikipedia, though a valuable research tool, has to be taken with a dose of salt the size of the Bonneville Flats. I admire Wikipedia's directed democracy ideal for producing an online encyclopedia, but I also have doubts about how well it works in practice.Tabletop, it turns out, has another name: Kim Dabelstein Petersen. She (or he?) is an editor at Wikipedia. What does she edit? Reams and reams of global warming pages. I started checking them. In every instance I checked, she defended those warning of catastrophe and deprecated those who believe the science is not settled. I investigated further. Others had tried to correct her interpretations and had the same experience as I -- no sooner did they make their corrections than she pounced, preventing Wikipedia readers from reading anyone's views but her own. When they protested plaintively, she wore them down and snuffed them out.
By patrolling Wikipedia pages and ensuring that her spin reigns supreme over all climate change pages, she has made of Wikipedia a propaganda vehicle for global warming alarmists. But unlike government propaganda, its source is not self-evident. We don't suspend belief when we read Wikipedia, as we do when we read literature from an organization with an agenda, because Wikipedia benefits from the Internet's cachet of making information free and democratic. This Big Brother enforces its views with a mouse.
Generally, I've found it about as reliable as any other encyclopedia (which isn't much), but only for topics that are either completely non-controversial or benignly trivial. Even then, entries face the danger of either falling to a mob consensus that is nothing but a shared falsehood or of a wrong-headed "expert" bleating rubbish about a topic so obscure that no one else bothers to contradict him. Then, of course, there's the annoyance of hacking and other vandalism. Now we find that there is the added danger of bullying "editors" who act as self-appointed officers of the Ministry of Truth.
Doubleplus ungood.
1 comment:
Well, people like her who abuse the changeable nature of Wikipedia and violate its' NPOV policy to spout their own personal views, are rather scummy.
I for one, although still leaning towards the AGW theories, would spurn anyone who says that the issue is solved; the point of science is to review and contradict! There may be other reasons beside us, and there may be scientific solutions to the problem aside from "Don't drive or eat"!
However, I may say that provided I use it for said non-controversial subjects (EG. the Trunkfish or the Large Hadron Collider), Wikipedia tends to cover most bases adequately.
...And it's still better than the crazy, bible-belt fundamentalist loony-bin that is Conservapedia. ¬_¬
Post a Comment