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

[Anthony]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 3:10 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Remember though Britannica is meant to be the best of the best in
> terms of encyclopedias . So unless you are going to define
> "encyclopedia" as "Encyclopedia Britannica" you have to accept that
> works with lower levels of reliability qualify as encyclopedias.

None of which I'd expect to say that John Seigenthaler is a murderer.
There are mistakes of facts, and then there's malicious lies.  I'd
definitely expect more of the latter in Wikipedia than in any of the
traditional encyclopedias.

> "Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia" is a great bit of rhetoric but it
> is not consistent with any rational definition of encyclopedia.

No, "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia" is not consistent with any rational
definitions of "Wikipedia" and "encyclopedia".  "Wikipedia" cannot be
"an encyclopedia", because it isn't "a work".

Put it in a fixed form, like on a CD, and then you can call it an encyclopedia.