On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 07:59:34PM -0400, Philip Sandifer wrote:
The problem here is that this line of reasoning, though consistent, is divorced from how people actually use an encyclopedia. We use attribution and verifiability because, in empirical fact, they are reasonably similar to truth. But in terms of actual use of Wikipedia as a resource, people depend on that isomorphism between accuracy and attribution. When that isomorphism breaks down, it poses a genuine problem.
Hear hear. It's simply incoherent to write without any concern for whether the content is generally "correct" in the widely-understood sense of the word, and then call the resulting product an "encyclopedia".
- Carl