Wily D wrote:
Most articles are written by a host of people who have a wide assortment of biases...
Wiki-info or some such thing... adopts an "advocate's" POV...
...the web is already full of biases sources - what pushes Wikipedia to the 9th most viewed site on the internets (or wherever we live these days) is partly NPOV... [it's] far more valuable than what drips out of a propoganda outlet.
Exactly. Advocates -- and indeed writers of all too many other stripes -- tell you what *they* want you to hear. It's the rare resource that is truly written with the reader, and the reader's needs, in mind. The reason people like Wikipedia articles so much is because they provide the kind of introduction to a subject that *they* want, not that some advocate wants.
This is, of course, the secret of google's success, too, and it's probably no coincidence that Wikipedia pages get such notoriously high pagerank. Marketeers, advertisers, and SEO's want you to go to their pages so they can tell you what they want to say. But google steadfastly rewards pages that *readers* like.