Theo Honohan on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:36:27 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precarity (one catholic systematically usurping it)


2009/2/17 Antonio A. Casilli <Antonio.Casilli@ehess.fr>:
>
> Let me just say that, if indeed not
> progressive, this is a democratic measure in that it is essentially
> majoritarian in nature. Wikipedia articles are not only about
> consensus among contributors, but also about *meeting the needs
> of a majority of readers*. If we forget about this, I'm afraid we
> would fall into the old pedantic logic of encyclopaedia entries
> which are accurate, but completely useless to their readers.

The alternative to consensus is coercion which is surely never OK in
principle. If we can find a technical solution we should.

Don't fight the other users, you'll turn into a monster like them.
If you have to fight something, fight to change the brain-damaged
software. Wikipedia takes an extremely powerful open source/version
control framework for knowledge and then stupefyingly cripples it by
imposing 18th-century encyclopedic epistemology. Deletionism is one
problem that arises from this. This debate over categorization is
another.

Luckily we can mostly ignore these problems because Wikipedia is not
the whole Internet.






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