On 5/28/07, William Pietri <william(a)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(a)gmail.com
Well we need to find some way or percolating more of them towards botany
articles. More of the ones with time. Experts aren't always needed,
though. Competence and good writing and editing skills, imo, outweigh
expertise for a lot of things.
KP