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I can't read the article because the server is down -- but people should be aware of Larry Sanger's history regarding Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger



tl;dr: Former philosophy professor who specializes in ethics and epistemology helped found Wikipedia, but got dissatisfied with Wikipedia's "lack of respect for expertise". He leaves Wikipedia, and ever since then, he's been highly critical of any aspect of Wikipedia that he thinks detracts from its credibility. This credibility, of course, is to be measured by traditional professional standards such as (surprise, surprise!) lack of "porn".

Nothing new there. There is a certain paradigm at the intersection of ethics and epistemology that makes it extremely difficult for people to appreciate that a repository of information can be valuable even if it does not explicitly recognize formal expertise. Adherents of this view always demand formal criteria for inclusion and exclusion, and believe that an absence of such formal criteria will inevitably lead to failure. The possibility that armchair philosophers will never be able to come up with criteria that work as well as the combined effect of a million ordinary edits never seems to cross their mind.

I could go on and on about how harmful this paradigm is (I wrote my PhD thesis on the very same topic, and yes, I'm a philosophy major) but I'll stop here because it quickly gets boring.


Reading the background on this Sanger does bring his post on Wikipedia's "problem" into a new light.

Perhaps he still has an axe to grind?


I'm not sure how reliable wikipedia's page on a critic of wikipedia is.


but people should be aware of Larry Sanger's history regarding Wikipedia

Which boils down to "Wikipedia critic is critical of Wikipedia."




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