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