Ray Saintonge wrote:
I just put my hand on a collection of essays by Ivan Ilich, "Celebration of Awarenes", published in 1971. I looked at one in particular: "Planned Poverty: The End Result of Technical Assistance." Among other things that he says: "the plough of the rich can do as much harm as their swords." "As the mind of a society is progressively schooled, step by step their individuals lose their sense that it might be possible to live without being inferior to others."
Time for a plug of my own. The most enlightening book on poverty that I've read was "Age of Consent" by George Monbiot. He puts the blame squarely on the financial system, explaining that it has been engineered to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. He kind of lost it towards the end, IMHO, preconditioning his clever and plausible solution for third world debt on an apparently ludicrous environmental scheme. Oh well, still a good read.
I think Wikipedia's role is to educate, so that the people living in abject poverty may be able to understand their condition and begin to formulate ways to correct it. According to Monbiot, the political will for such action must come from the poor countries themselves, since the democracies of developed countries are dominated by self-interest.
I think it is horrible to equate ignorance with individuality. We're not running some sort of anthropological zoo, where cultures must be preserved in their present state for the amusement of Western tourists. Let them decide how they want to live their life, and give them what they need to make that decision rationally.
Now I'm ranting against a point you didn't really make... I'll stop here. Except to say that the above paragraph was partly inspired by Polly Toynbee's essay in the book "On the Edge".
-- Tim Starling