[WikiEN-l] User:Hillman's arguments

[Kirill Lokshin]

On 7/27/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
> 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)

The flaw of this argument is that it projects the ails of a small
number of articles -- primarily topics of current political and social
interest -- onto an overwhelming majority of articles that don't
suffer from them.  Our coverage of the Cassowary is not given
(purposeful) misinformation, our article on the Siege of Florence
doesn't really resemble a blog, and so forth.

In other words: alarm is not called for at this point.  Despite the
failings of a (relatively) miniscule number of articles, the vast
underbelly of historical, scientific, and literary topics that
includes most of our coverage is steadily moving forward with "proper"
encyclopedic work.

-- 
Kirill Lokshin