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An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

newyorker.com

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Re: An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "summary of all human knowledge" that deliberately follows up with "well, actually not all human knowledge" is either dishonest or a failure.

They are different statements. They just sound similar. "The sum of all human knowledge" would suggest that everything in Wikipedia is known to be true, and everything known to be true is in Wikipedia. In "a summary of all human knowledge," the indefinite article and the word summary both imply a point of view. The sentence says that the knowledge has been abridged, and therefore, that there exists an abridger. It sa…

An abridged summary is one thing.

An abridged summary that editorially chooses which knowledge is worthy of summarizing is another thing.

Wikipedia is the latter. The "all knowledge" bit should not be part of the description, because it's not true. Wikipedia actually attempts to create "a summary of selected portions of human knowledge, chosen by those users with the most willingness to endlessly argue on the internet about what should and should not be included".

Re: An Open Letter to Wikipedia (2012)

#32
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if a blog entry by Roth would have sufficed as a secondary source. It probably would have. They need something to point to after all. It can't just anecdotally be noted that a wikipedia editor received an email from the author. One solution could be to give people forums on Wikipedia to state their perspectives, which would then become source material for articles. Assuming there is some way to verify their…

>It can't just anecdotally be noted that a wikipedia editor received an email from the author. For a work of fiction, it absolutely should. Who knows more about a character in a fictional story than the person who made up the character? Should we purge everything from the record that Douglas Adams ever said about Arthur Dent? If Wikipedia was around in the 1500's, the entry on Shakespeare would be almost entirely bas…

You are conflating "said" with "wrote and got published", which is, as pointed out, a fundamental aspect of the situation.
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