On 4/7/08, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
When the issue of Wikipedia's
"unreliability" comes up, I like to
point out that we can't, don't and have never promised "reliability"
-
what we are, in fact, is *useful*. (I make such a bold claim based on
our horrendous mainstream popularity. Hands up all the old hand
encyclopedia nerds here who thought it would get this far this quickly
...)
Indeed. We are useful. And I am hard pressed to believe that if you
asked a random, non-wonk user if our usefulness to them was based on
the fact that we are generally accurate, the answer would be "yes"
almost all of the time.
To dismiss accuracy as some philosophical technicality is to deny the
reality of why people look things up in encyclopedias.
Naturally we strive to be
accurate, but the judgements of accuracy and
usefulness are for outsiders to make. The obsessive-compulsives need to
abandon the notion that they are the guardians of accuracy.
Ec