Wikis were invented as a way, and are a good solution when the goal is, to crowdsource objective facts about the world.
The great thing about a wiki is that as long as one person once added any given fact, it is in the wiki.
On all contentious issues, by definition there are not too few people wanting to write about them, but instead there are too many, so this is why wikis are just not a suitable mechanism for writing about anything contentious: they’re a solution to a nonexistent problem and there is no rational reason why truth about any given issue should be determined by “who has managed to edit the page last”.
The downside - and I’m in favour of wikis like Wikipedia - is that any yahoo or otherwise can also put misinformation in there, perhaps even in good faith, and that’s in the wiki forever too.
And those who comb through article histories will have to contend with both the truth (we hope, whether we like it or not) as well as the nonsense.
One other difficulty is Internet-based sources disappearing or re-formatting, breaking links from Wikipedia and other places. This is the reader’s reminder to donate to the Internet Archive if not Wikipedia itself, providing you can spare a little money to throw their way.
Speaking of the archive: Anyone know whether Russia blocks the archive or maintains their own equivalent?
Wikis were invented as a way, and are a good solution when the goal is, to crowdsource objective facts about the world.
The great thing about a wiki is that as long as one person once added any given fact, it is in the wiki.
On all contentious issues, by definition there are not too few people wanting to write about them, but instead there are too many, so this is why wikis are just not a suitable mechanism for writing about anything contentious: they’re a solution to a nonexistent problem and there is no rational reason why truth about any given issue should be determined by “who has managed to edit the page last”.
The downside - and I’m in favour of wikis like Wikipedia - is that any yahoo or otherwise can also put misinformation in there, perhaps even in good faith, and that’s in the wiki forever too.
And those who comb through article histories will have to contend with both the truth (we hope, whether we like it or not) as well as the nonsense.
One other difficulty is Internet-based sources disappearing or re-formatting, breaking links from Wikipedia and other places. This is the reader’s reminder to donate to the Internet Archive if not Wikipedia itself, providing you can spare a little money to throw their way.
Speaking of the archive: Anyone know whether Russia blocks the archive or maintains their own equivalent?