Some good comments on the Wikipedia debate. Albert Ip writes, "The days when only a selected few can author have long gone. Reputation is likely to be a good indicator of the authority status in a subject domain. However, reputation is NOT citation count." Noting that "when there is no SINGLE best manifestation of any knowledge, the next best thing we can have is a dynamic manifestation of that knowledge domain," Ip argues that teachers should reconsider allowing students to cite Wikipedia. This, it seems to me, is related to the point he makes in his previous post: "if we can accept that information is external to us and knowledge is our internal constructs of the world, things started to feel a little better." The very idea that we could have one indisputable set of facts is wrong - knowledge depends as much on point of view as on reference and denotation. And one of the things the recent Nature study does not get at is that Wikipedia represents a much different - wider, and more inclusive - set of points of view than Britannica ever could.
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