This confusion about "truth" is tiresome [1]. It is completely possible for their to be a single objective (ontological) reality and corresponding *truth*, but to appreciate that we each have our own (epistemic) *perspective* and *understanding* which is imperfect -- as Wales indicates. I'm beginning to suspect that po-mo and conservative pundits continue this misunderstanding with each other so they can feel provocative or get attention. Macha says "there are many truths" and Keen states "when you democratize this, truth is the casualty." Oh, for heaven's sake: shame on both of them.

Keen's book was sloppy; my favorite critic of Wikipedia continues to be Robert McHenry who notes "I don't question the fact that there's a great deal of very good very solid information in Wikipedia, it could hardly be otherwise. By sheer chance there would be there some good stuff in there. My criticism is that there is some very very bad stuff, and there's no way to tell the difference" (30 minute). The "sheer chance" bit is true and made me laugh -- and this is the recurrent motif of monkeys banging on typewriters which, as I discuss in [2], has been a recurrent theme since Norbert Weiner decades ago, and even back to Gottfried Leibniz in 1680. But his criticism of telling the difference *is* important and amendable to improvement, though it appears to be a difficult problem. Some sort of approved content scheme for Wikipedia has been discussed often, and was even proposed and discussed 10 years earlier on Interpedia [3].

[1]:http://reagle.org/joseph/2006/disp/proposal.html#heading9 [[ ... In Theories of Truth, Richard Kirkham (1995:2) notes that notions of truth vary. When philosophers address the topic, they might be undertaking any number of projects, such as asking what is truth, what is it for something to be true, what do we mean by the terms truth and falsehood, what are criterion of truth, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions of a statement's truth? Or, perhaps they are providing a descriptive account of the use of "true," specifying criteria of evidence, or showing how truth conditions depend on sentence structure. Furthermore, philosophers pursuing these notions might often be vague in their description of their project, confusing in that they conflate the distinct projects above without realizing it, ambiguous in that they use the same words for different concepts (e.g., "myth" as false or "myth" as believed to be true by the individual), misleading in using different words for the same concepts (e.g., "transsubjective" and "objective"). Consequently, I will briefly touch upon the work of scholars concerned with communication to pose an understanding of subjective experience, common intersubjective ground, and shared hints of objectivity. ... ]] [2]:http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/culture/wikipedia/annc-in-good-faith [3]:http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1994q1/1003.html