[Foundation-l] Umberto Eco's interview

[Ray Saintonge]

Peter Damian wrote:
> Thank for the interview, very interesting. However, Eco is not uncritical about Wikipedia.
>
> "Wikipedia, like the whole Internet, has the problem of filtering the news. It keeps both false and real news; but the rich know filtering techniques at least for the areas they know how to check. If I have to do a search on Plato, I have no problem immediately identifying the sites written by madmen, but if I am researching stem cells it's not certain that I can identify the wrong sites."
>   

The Internet is one big Tea Party. :-)

> Collective control is therefore useful up to a certain point: it is conceivable that if one gives a false length of the equator, sooner or later someone will come along and fix it, but correction of more subtle and difficult issues is more complicated And it seems to me that the internal control is minimal, that is, it cannot control the millions of new changes flowing in. At most, it can check if a madman wrote that Napoleon is a racehorse, but there's not too much it can do."
>   

As long as the equine set retains a fetish about unique names,  ("My 
Wife Knows Everything" and "The Wife Doesn't Know" , see 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVMY-VX7NyA. ) there would be nothing 
surprising about a horse named Napoleon.  If the horse were suitably 
notable there would still need to be disambiguators to distinguish the 
horse from any minor French despots.

Ray
>
> Peter
>