[WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia dying?

[Charles Matthews]

Ken Arromdee wrote:
> Telling someone to just fix it tells them to fix the symptoms of a problem.
> It rarely fixes the actual problem.  And hoping that many people, all fixing
> one mistake each, will fix the problem together isn't going to work; the
> problem is not just that we have a lot of mistakes, it's that the mistakes
> have an underlying cause.  Fixing the mistakes doesn't fix the underlying
> cause.
>
> And the complainer can't fix the underlying cause.  That's for us to do, and
> we need to listen when someone complains, not tell him to just fix it.
>
>   
Interesting to compare this with something else Morozov has apparently 
argued  (http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate-uk/tag/evgeny-morozov/) 
"The Internet can actually inhibit rather than empower civil society". 
Those unreliable folk on Wikipedia define civil society as follows: 
"Civil society is composed of the totality of voluntary civic and social 
organizations and institutions that form the basis of a functioning 
society as opposed to the force-backed structures of a state (regardless 
of that state's political system) and commercial institutions of the 
market." Sounds a bit to me as if "sofixit" is a snappy way of defining 
participation from the side of civil society, without the guns or cash 
to fix underlying causes. Sure, patching up a given Wikipedia article is 
just a form of do-gooding, not changing the reasons it was flawed 
(ignorance or bias being a couple that might be involved).

Since Wikipedia in fact contradicts Morozov's thesis, perhaps it is not 
so surprising he advances the criticisms he does.

Charkes