[Wikidata-l] Fwd: [Wiki-research-l] Wikidata opinion piece in The Atlantic

[JFC Morfin]

At 11:36 13/04/2012, Jeroen De Dauw wrote:
>Hey,
>I've been following the usage of WikiData on twitter, and for the 
>last week or so, more then half the tweets have been pointing to 
>this article. Apparently people like to criticize :)

To discuss something fundamental is not criticizing. This article 
raises a problem we know very well à the different (linguistic, 
telecom, network) strata below (diversity, orthotypography, 
normalization, informatics, canonization, globalization, 
internationalization, etc. ) which now touches the semantical and 
intellectual strata.

Engineering issues, as discussed here, are for the technical 
processes to work better. The problem is to determine what "better" 
societaly means in an "antropobotical" society (persons/robots) like 
ours - broadly influenced by its daily experience of Wikipedia. This 
leads to fundamental questions on the Freedom of Knowledge. The 
difficulty is the resulting ethical/technical loop and the impact on 
engineering orientations.

jfc