I agree with that comment. Google supporting Wikipedia, added with the annoying traffic Wikipedia already gets, makes Google less reliable when you actually need good information. However, I’m guessing that’s what their Scholarly search is for – No Wikipedia.

suppose a person contributes to wikipedia.

you, and a great deal many other people, would refer to that as content creation. your rationale, explicit or otherwise, is that something that did not previously exist now does. that is creation. consequently, a few rules and practical observations apply to it just as well as to any instance of creation.

for instance, that people should be allowed to finish their damned sentence. that their quirks be accomodated, if not downright revered. that their oppinions be protected from injunctions by extraneous criteria, such as popularity, voting and vetoing, etc.

this is all right and good, this way of thinking is well supported by abundant record, and perfectly defensible.

wikipedia however is based on two fundamental propositions, that are not explicit, and that are, once explicit, visibly incorrect.

firstly, wikipedia proposes that the sum of all human knowledge is a sum of like parts. as a result, you can pick persay a correct color in which the human knowledge is to be recorded, and there won’t be any problems.

of course there are going to be problems. and of course the immediate solution would be to hang said problems from the eiffel tower and pretend they go away.

they won’t. human knowledge is not a sum of like parts. it is, necessarily, a sum of unlike parts, that are irreductible in their unlikeness, a point immediately familiar to anyone aquainted with, say, theory of knowledge, or the math behind systems design, or a good many other fields. heck, a bright pr person could come up with the observation.

there is in fact not one single thing that can be said about “all knowledge” positively. we can’t even say if it will fit on a4 paper, or if a set of arbitrary characters, as long as finite no matter how long, will be sufficient to describe it.

second, that making wikipedia entries out of knowledge is not creation, but moreover a sort of regurgitation. in a very platonician outlook, it’s not that something that didn’t previously exist now does. it’s that something that existed before all, an idea, forced itself into a new shape, through the slavish hands of some people. a rubber stamp left it’s impression on one more piece of paper. it’s not the hands that did it.

this notion, of course, has been copiously commented and rebuffed for the past thousand years or so. it’s not suddenly become valid, even if it may seem so if regarded through particularly thick blindfolds.

now, this divorce in between what you, and those people imagine when they hear about a “wiki” and what is in fact meant by the proponents has the massive disadvantage of not being immediately visible to you. it’s a sort of trap.

but the fact remains wikipedia, as a project, is built on two major fallacies. they can’t be fixed, in any way, after the fact. if you set sail without a compass, there’s no ammount of procedure you can invent with regards to the proper scrubbing of decks that will point you north.

consequently, wikipedia can not be fixed. it will be abandoned, like many other fallacious approaches have been. it won’t even take as much as the historical norm. hopefully no famine will result from it, and no spilled blod.

but your hope to see some sort of fixing to keep it from spawning more and more idiocy in various second hand sources is futile. in fact, that a source of information is vulnerable to wiki contamination just shows it needs to be disposed of, much like unsecured-by-design systems had to be disposed of.

http://citizendium.org/essay.html

Larry Sanger is forking Wikipedia. Among other interesting ideas he intends Citizendium to have subject matter experts; something along the lines of OSS-like ‘maintainers’ and ‘project leaders,’ I think.

No way. The average article on Wikipedia most certainly does not have 50,000 people checking it for factual errors and editing it.