Wikipedia goes down in protest at the prospect of the enactment of anti-piracy laws to protect original works. This is not surprising because, if Jimmy Wales and his team were prevented from pillaging the works of others, Wikipedia would not exist at all. Wikipedia is remarkable only for the fact that, despite the pillage, it remains a dangerous and unregulated mine of misinformation. In a world of over-regulation in many areas of purely personal life, it is a shame that such miserable and piratical efforts as Wikipedia, in the public domain, are not banned out-right. Wiki's argument seems to be that The People own the Internet and everything on it: this is tripe and, near as damn it, communism. No one has a right to copy or pass off the original works of others just because they can be reduced to digital technology. Go hang, Wikipedia.
Come to that, you cannot even spell 'encylopaedia'.
Wednesday, 18 January 2012
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What utter codswallop. I despise the unthinking commentator who conforms with popular opinion in declaring Obama a failure, the state of British ethics a wreck and Wikipedia an 'unregulated mine of misinformation'. A study found that Wikipedia was as accurate in the huge topic of Science - it being impossible to research all encyclopaedic subjects - as the Encyclopaedia Britannica itself. Of course there are going to be pockets of untruth in such a sprawling mass but broadly speaking Wikipedia is an accurate and reliable source of information. The worst thing about it is that it discourages substantial reading and informing about topics as it seems to think statistics constitute the soul of every matter, but that is a problem endemic to the internet as a whole.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that I do not conspicuously do is 'conform with popular opinion.' I don't know much about President Obama and I am not sure that there is much to know. He seems to have been something of a neuter in his office: the USA continues in economic crisis; little has been achieved in terms of social objectives and the USA is still waging other nations' civil wars. I know little of the state of 'British ethics' (however they may be defined) but I can see that the British nation is in a state of socio-economic breakdown. I do not much care for any encyclopaedia: even the DNB contains much tripe and 'codswallop'. However, most other encyclopaedias are subject to an editorial process before publication and 'Wiki' is not. That is an important failing.
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