<http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php>
is quite good and gets to the heart of the thing I think.
Wikipedia should be used selectively.
If I want to get a quick refresher on solar fusion reactions or the operation of NAND gates or even, surprisingly, Renaissance painting I'll start with Wikipedia. If I want to learn about Latin American politics, I won't.
It's really that simple.
Carr makes the very sensible point that what inspires us to be excessively critical of things like blogs and Wikipedia aren't the inevitable imperfections and biases (it's really impossible to eliminate bias) but boosters' hyper-real claims of the imminent approach of a "Web 2.0" knowledge singularity - of which Wikipedia, for the starry-eyed, appears to be the white hot center.
This sort of nonsense makes people with a realistic understanding of web events cranky. Crankiness leads to a focus on flaws and a downplaying of strengths.
I enjoy Wikipedia and, as I wrote, often turn to it for certain types of information. Even so, I talk it down to my more excitable Net comrades who are too eager to put on their jet packs and soar to the next level of rhapsodic techno-dreaming.
.d.
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When experiments were made with very weak light hitting photomultipliers, the wave theory collapsed[...]This state of confusion was called the 'wave/particle duality' of light.
Richard Feynman