As I’m writing this column for the Financial Post, I am simultaneously editing a page on Wikipedia. I am confident that just about everything I write for my column will be available for you to read. I am equally confident that you will be able to read just about nothing that I write for the page on Wikipedia.
Fascinating and somewhat disturbing article on how ideological zealots scour Wikipedia looking for offenses to their worldview and edit undesirable information and opinions out of existence. In this instance the offending information was Solomon’s research into whether a consensus on climate change really does exist in the scientific community. Read the whole thing, as they say.
I say somewhat disturbing, because I gave up on the whole concept of crowdsourced scholarship years ago when the first Wikipedia scandals hit. Someone once famously – and very foolishly – said “information wants to be free”. Nonsense. What information really wants is to be co-opted to the ideological agenda of any random academic idiot with too much time on their hands and a membership on the Wikipedia board of editors.
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