[Foundation-l] Misplaced Reliance, was Re: Paid editing, was Re: Ban and moderate

[Anthony]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 1:19 PM, Austin Hair <adhair at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 6:33 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>> On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 11:52 AM,  <wiki-list at phizz.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>> On 24/10/2010 14:20, Fred Bauder wrote:
>>>> Taking this problem seriously, how can we mitigate misplaced reliance?
>>>
>>> Well you could put a banner above every article that read "The
>>> information contained on the page could well be nonsense".
>>
>> A better start would be to stop calling Wikipedia an encyclopedia.
>
> Who on earth thinks an encyclopedia is an authoritative source?

How is that relevant?

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 1:03 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
>> On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 11:52 AM,  <wiki-list at phizz.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>> On 24/10/2010 14:20, Fred Bauder wrote:
>>>> Taking this problem seriously, how can we mitigate misplaced reliance?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Well you could put a banner above every article that read "The
>>> information contained on the page could well be nonsense".
>>
>> A better start would be to stop calling Wikipedia an encyclopedia.
>>
>
> We define what encyclopedia means at this point, and research has shown
> that more "professional" encyclopedias also contain errors, the
> difference is that you can't fix them easily.

Two other differences are that biases in encyclopedias are generally
easier to discover (in large part because they are usually consistent
across an entire article), and that you can find out who to blame for
them (either generally or specifically depending on the seriousness
and willfulness of the error).

> That said, any suggestions which adequately represents the power and
> utility of our product, but avoids implication of inerrancy?

I wouldn't want to waste much time on this as it has zero chance of
being followed, but something like "the free bulletin board" would
probably be more accurate.