It was a noble idea. Let everyone with an interest be allowed to add their knowledge regarding a topic, and the intelligence of the common man will shine through in creating an online encyclopedia. Let the differing opinions work out a compromise, and we’ll have nice, even-handed articles. It might have worked, except the people running the show were themselves unable to grasp the vision they stated. For whatever reasons, they allowed the worst sort of propagandists to run things.
I dearly love how Tim Bolen describes it:
People work hard in their lives to accomplish things. They don’t need to have some homeless, muttering, schizophrenic wander into a public library, plop their reeking selves down in front of the public internet, and log onto Wikipedia with a “private” name, to take out their resentments against their betters, by re-writing articles with so-called facts that were born in their drug-soaked, in-and-out of consciousness, mind. Nobody needs that.
But that’s one of the opportunities you provide. You call it “privacy,” and you actually think it is a good thing. Grow up.
Wikipedia has become one of the best places to find lies not fully covered by the mainstream media. Because slander and such is actionable, Mr. Bolen encourages people to sue Wikimedia, the company behind Wikipedia. I love it.
Lest we forget, the world is fallen. Your average human doesn’t have time to mess up your life, so it works out pretty well most of the time. It’s the people who have nothing better to do who make up the activist portion. When something truly horrific happens, you’ll get a rise out of just about everyone, but for daily evil, all it takes is a relatively tiny group of hateful sinners to ruin it for the rest of us. Since these people lack the physical courage to be predators in a gang, they instead form a pack of liars who dominate what used to be once regarded as a good source of information.
Wikipedia’s reputation is justly foul.
