> I won't comment on the current Wiki brouhaha, since I've retired from
> contributing. Last summer, I spent some time on the Wikipedia (as a
> good way to cleanse the mental palate between jobs). It's fun, but the
> fact is that when I stopped (as the intensity of work increased),
> along come various libertarians (Austrian economists, etc.) who change
> content often in an ignorant and especially biased way. (There are
> also those who use obscenities to replace entire paragraphs which they
> disagree with.) Not having the time or energy for a constant battle,
> I've given up. If unrestrained, the Wikipedia has a basic tendency to
> go where the LA TIMES wiki-editorial went, but more slowly.
>
> It seems to me that the Wikipedia is an anarchist experiment. To work,
> all participants must constantly struggle to correct the contributions
> of all the others. More importantly, everyone must be _disciplined_,
> to avoid posting their points of view as the Truth. There must be a
> clear community of shared values. It looks to me as if these
> conditions aren't there at this time.
>
> An alternative would be having greater editorial control, but that
> would be admitting that the anarchist experiment had failed.
Wikipedia is an anarchist experiment, roughly speaking, which is being used by contemporary Americans who have been trained to be individualistic, competitive, and narrow-minded. To a great extent there is some good content on Wikipedia which shows the better side of the open-editing concept. On the other hand, Wikipedia needs some policies and procedures to deal with problem people *including* problem editors who sincerely think they are doing the right thing. As you point out in your example, there are plenty of cases where somebody who knows something about a subject makes a contribution, only to have some fanatic or ignorant editor fuck up your contribution. I've lost count of the number of times that I've corrected an entry, only to have some nosey "editor" comes along, see the revisions, and label my changes as being "vandalism."
Chuck