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If Trolls Wrote and Edited an Influential Online Encyclopedia

Wikipedia

We’ve noted recent episodes of Wikipedia editors erasing ID proponents or their accomplishments from the online encyclopedia (see here, here, and here). But observing discrete cases like that misses the larger point of what’s wrong with the whole Wiki project. Over at Uncommon Descent, Denyse O’Leary explains well:

The basic idea behind Wikipedia is wrong for a number of reasons. One is that the model assumes that the people most likely to have the needed perspective are the ones who care most. Anyone familiar with the behaviour of trolls knows that trolls care more than anyone and usually have the least to offer the public.

Wikipedia is my library” is the new diagnostic for laziness.

File under, “I wish I’d said that.” Of course, being the type of person with all that time on your hands and all that passion, and spite, to go with it, is, in Denyse’s phase, a diagnostic for being just exactly the kind of person who shouldn’t be writing and editing a source that countless people turn to first for information. The problem is multiplied when readers are lazy and uncritical, which is basically the human condition.