On Jan 13, 2005, at 1:11 AM, Tim Starling wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
Just a couple of facts that weren't obvious to me at first glance but which I think are important:
- The linked article was written by Stirling Newberry
- Stirling Newberry is involved in a heated dispute over the
[[Intelligent Design]] article.
The article makes more sense when you read it in that context.
-- Tim Starling
Other way around. I am on the ID article because it is a test of the current system. It's easy to keep out Holocaust denial, because the POV that it is cover for is universally rejected. Much harder is removing intellectual fraud that is cover for some fraction of a popular point of view. If wikipedia is merely mobocracy, then it does not converge on credibility.
There are similar articles on other aspects of creationism, many of which, ahem, would get you laughed out of first year biology or geology. Those arguing for expert gatekeeping have these articles as proof that the system doesn't work, or, at the very least, is unstable - prone to being upset at any moment, and untrustworthy because one never knows if one is going to get garbage disinformation.
The reality of this is that there are risk adverse users of information, and there are also purveyors of disinformation. The risk adverse information users lie in fear of exactly what is going on on wikipedia's articles on Creationism: organized intellectual fraud being let through the gates.
This is a security flaw in wikipedia's process, the argument of open source projects is that flaws are easily discovered, reported, and dealt with. The argument of proprietary projects is that such flaws are best dealt with by small selected groups of people out of reach of others.