[WikiEN-l] Paul Taylor

[George Herbert]

On 5/28/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
> Cheney Shill wrote:
> > As Stephen Colbert said in an interview with Wikipedia
> > founder Jimmy Wales:
> > "What I love about it is that it brings democracy to
> > information.  For too long, the elites that study things
> > got to say what is or isn't real." - The Colbert Report,
> > 2007.05.24
> >
>
> Colbert has a point here. We surely do have crap like that.
>
> But I think this is massively outweighed by the inverse effect. By
> putting power in the hands of the people, those people are having to
> confront issues and and learn skills that previously were the domain of
> the elite. The pyramid becomes wider. Not that Wikipedia is new in this;
> as far as I can tell things have been moving in this direction since
> Gutenberg.

In addition to encouraging people to become jacks-of-all-trades,
Wikipedia has demonstrated that given a large enough pool of people,
you'll find experts in essentially anything, who will percolate to the
places that they're necessary.

It's not a pretty process, but it works.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com