The following is distilled from a recent exchange on the Wikipediocracy Forum:

greybeard wrote:

Never before has the definition of “encyclopedia” included current events, lengthy biographies of recent celebrities, up-to-date statistics about current sporting events, exhaustive descriptions of mass-culture phenomenon, or lengthy expositions on unsettled and/or controversial matters of science, economics, and so on. We have traditionally had other publications — newspapers, almanacs, fan books, sports compendia, scholarly and not-so-scholarly journals, People magazine, etc — for those purposes.

Indeed, the Internet has massively democratized access to information generally, so that I can find the lyrics to virtually any pop song, a review of any movie and play, quality medical information about every disease and treatment, and a myriad of other information online from a variety of reputable (and not reputable) sources. Laymen and amateurs of every stripe can gain access online to information that was formerly the purview of only experts with access to research libraries and the skill to locate such material.

But the converse situation has not (entirely) arisen. The professional diplomat or statesmen does not leap up and say “Israel’s settlement expansion in the East Jerusalem town of Gilo is clearly illegal under section 49 of the UN ruling … I know because Wikipedia says so!” No physicist will say “The presence of helium in cold-fusion reactions showing anomalous heat signatures seems to indicate some kind of reaction … I read that on Wikipedia, so it must be true!” Not at all. Statesmen, scientists, and others continue to (quite properly) use specialist sources and primary materials to form their professional opinions.

So who is it that various zealots (whether on Pokemon, the Middle East conflict, or Cold Fusion) are trying to reach by pushing this stuff into Wikipedia? Answer: the lazy and not-very-smart. They want to

…continue reading Wikipedia’s Problem in a Nutshell