[WikiEN-l] User:Hillman's arguments

Jesse W jessw at netwood.net
Thu Jul 27 07:08:19 UTC 2006


I just replaced the content of my user page with the following.  I 
thought I would mention this on the list, also, as the resulting 
discussion might be useful.

I find the arguments at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hillman to be 
disturbing, sensible, and very worrying. I encourage everyone who reads 
this to go read them, and think about them. As I understand them, the 
central point is that Wikipedia, along with many other cultural forces, 
are encouraging convenience over correctness, i.e. it's more important 
to find an answer than the best answer. The specifics, which are as 
important as the general issues, are that, even as the absolute number 
of excellent article revisions stored on Wikipedia increases, the 
percentage of non-misleading article revisions is decreasing; i.e. 
people who want to use Wikipedia to mislead others are having more and 
more sucess. This also is very disturbing to me, and causes me to 
strongly reconsider my participation in Wikipedia - it is not good work 
to do your part in polishing a building which is being increasingly 
taken over by filth. I would be better off submitting corrections to 
resources which are not suffering from this maledy. This is saddening. 
I would love to hear any rebuttals, or even mere comments of sympathy, 
on my talk page. JesseW, the juggling janitor 07:03, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Jesse Weinstein




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