Wikipedia is not something different. If you enter
“encyclopedia” in the title in Amazon.com’s advance
search, you will see that there are more than
25,000 books that have encyclopedia in their title.
There are so many different kinds of encyclopedia
out there. Given your staunch support for expansive
intellectual property and non-property rights,
why don’t you buy these books to support the authors
so that they can include the “all your base are
belong to us” phrase in their encyclopedia? Your
embracing Wikipedia surprises me. It seems that you
unknowingly and blindly are drawn to the dark side
of Stallman that seems more deadly than the carving
knife.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<[email protected]>

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this
comment in the public domain.

“Not Stallman or Torvalds, but Stallman and Torvalds!” 😉

Lots of hard, boring or unpleasant work is involved in the mice’s “fun” or jimbo’s “joy”. Edit wars in wikis or regressions in free software can be depressing. Why do more people not just give up and rent a movie instead?

In my opinion, people believe in the goal of free/open projects. Not the ideological direction of their founders, but in the practical aim. They are motivated by the prospect of the satisfaction of having completed the project and by the prospect of the utility of the finished work at least as much as by any fleeting enjoyment that may come from working on it.

But even this “fun” would not be possible without its supporting ideological framework. In my opinion, a project just designed for people to have fun would not look the same as Wikipedia or Linux.

There’s an interesting example of a non-“Free” but open development process that nonetheless satisfied its community here:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/4/18

As for why a liberated encyclopedia is good; it supports all human endeavour equally. This is a greater good (in terms of social or economic value, or of moral coherency) than providing a subset of universal knowledge to a few, however worthy that goal may have been in the past.

..your conclusion, however, that the soft information of massive edits being a guidepost to knowing the accuracy or contentiousness of an article falls short because of one aspect of wikipedia: complete and utter lack of accountability.

The fact is, in the swastika article I link, the massive amounts of edits are in many cases totally vacuous; people with no research or knowledge on the subject jumping in to make procedural changes or to remove information because they don’t think it’s right. Then others try to put it back, and then a fight ensues. Those dozens of edits over a single fact or set of facts don’t provide soft information at all; they just reveal that there were a lot of edits.

Subsequently, an article with 30 edits that all are minor don’t reveal anything on Wikipedia other than the battle not being waged there, so far.

Minor administrative changes, including accountability, would improve wikipedia’s efficiency greatly. But as it is, it is not worth the time of a lot of people (working on the inside).

One of the comments made to me are that my concerns are all from the point of view of content CREATORS and EDITORS. USERS don’t care if it took Wikipedia 1000 people and 3 years to achieve what 10 people could in 2 days. But I care, hence I do not contribute work to it any longer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check

Check out some past articles and how they were formatted and apply it other articles.

There is more to knowledge than just having access to the facts. I have had some education in legal theory and history and have access to Lexis/Nexis, but I doubt Prof. Lessig would give up his tenured position to me since I can “obviously” do his job at a lower cost to his employer (making more money available to spend on the students and increasing the utility of this investment in a “knowledge worker”) given my limited experience but unbounded access to collections of facts.

Diana wrote:
>(Actually, that’s impossible. Wikipedia
>will never include what I ate for
>breakfast this morning, although I know
>it. Nor should it. An encyclopedia
>should be selective. But nevermind that…)

Absolutely right! An encyclopedia absolutely should not include what you ate for breakfast. In my mission statement this is the work of the word ‘sum’… not “all human knowledge” but the “sum”. I use the word in the sense used by Rand in VS, 21: “expanding one’s knowledge into an ever-growing sum.” One’s knowledge, like the knowledge placed into an encyclopedia, is not a random collection of unintegrated facts, but a sum.

An encyclopedia should be and must be selective. And Wikipedia, of course, is.

Now that we have that out of the way, of course the much more interesting question is: “What’s the egoistic defense of free knowledge?”

The short answer is that I benefit from other people having access to information. I expect to benefit from everyone in the world, no matter where they are, having the tools at hand to educate themselves out of whatever false beliefs they would otherwise be unable to overcome due to lack of information. I don’t think terrorists, for example, are born that way, but made that way by comprachicos of the mind. If we can bathe the world in free knowledge, free neutral, clear, high quality knowledge, make it ubiquitous, then we undermine those who seek control through brainwashing.

The longer answer involves understanding the intellectual values to be gained from the sort of discipline that writing for Wikipedia imposes on the author, from an interaction with other people who are passionately committed to getting it right. Most people who work on Wikipedia find it in no way a self-sacrifice or duty, but rather a passionate expression of the joy of working with knowledge.

So while I don’t think very many things are self-evidently of value, I think that a free encyclopedia comes pretty close.

For example, though I haven’t tested it, I suspect the Japanese entry about WWII and the US version of the same have got to be pretty different (although both reasonably accurate from their own point of view). The combo would present a more comprehensive entry than either of the individual entries.