[ Don't Cc: me unless you take this discussion off imc-tech ]
On Mon, Nov 15, 2004 at 04:26:42PM -0800, Stan Shebs wrote:
That's what I do best. I'm a librarian, media activist and anarchist. My role is to ask questions and be a curmudgeon.
I've written criticism about Wikipedia on my blog, both positive and negative. As a librarian, I think that it is an awesome project, which really should be better appreciated by people who are stuck in past paradigms about "information accuracy." As an anarchist, Wikipedia troubles me. While the open source nature of the project is very anarchistic, I'm really pissed that right wing assholes are allowed to post falsehoods to the entry on "anarchism." This problem forced me to discontinue my participation in the project.
"*Allowed* to post"? Maybe you're not quite as much of an anarchist as you thought. :-)
Or maybe he's more of an anarchist than you think there might be :-)
The way I see it, anarchism is not about allowing anyone to do anything to you. It is more about opposing the power, which also can be expressed as not allowing anyone to excercise power over anyone else.
If it was really the case that Wikipedia moderators allowed to present right-wing opinion about anarchism as a neutral fact and dismissed Chuck0's objections, that would be a clear example of excercise of power, i.e. something anarchists oppose.
As for the original question, I share Chuck0's concerns about Wikipedia: I also noticed that its NPOV tends to favor mildly right-wing opinion. However, I see this problem as something that can be and should be dealt with: if anarchists and Indymedia activists can get an equal voice over moderation issues (through sufficient transparency and accountability), that would be a great improvement over commercial media who misrepresent or in best case quietly ignore our efforts. It is not a problem that our position is labeled as "opinionated" -- as long as the opposite position is also labeled as such.