Godwin's Law On Wikipedia

In the post below I pointed to Mike Godwin's new weblog Godwin's Law as much for its wonderfully retro design as for its content. Pointing makes you click and when I did I came across this wonderfully Godwinesque series of postings on the Wikipedia kerfuffle. If you'd like to get caught up on this debate with the aid of a good guide, here are some excerpts:

Godwin's Law - Thoughts on Wikipedia, Part I

The question ought not to be whether you should trust Wikipedia (for whatever value of "trust" you want to use), but why you should give your trust to traditional publications (where errors and distortions persist, when they occur, for decades and even centuries).

My reaction when someone complains about an inaccuracy in Wikipedia is always this: Why didn't you fix it? Because, you know, you had the power to do so.

Clay Shirky: "It's not that it doesn't matter what academics think of the Wikipedia -- it would obviously be better to have as many smart people using it as possible. The problem is that the only thing that would make the academics happy would be to shoehorn it into the kind of filter, then publish model that is broken, and would make the Wikipedia broken as well."

Wikipedia, with all its flaws, is an amazing accomplishment, and it stands for the proposition that, whatever its vulnerabilities, most of us want to promote the truth, to share knowledge, to make it available for everybody else, and to make the world better.

Most of us who have long been interested in the Cargo Cults will already have noted that hardly anyone ever tries to stir up fear, uncertainty, and doubt about them, because they're not perceived as any kind of threat. By contrast, various corporations (and the occasional affiliated foundation) sure keep beating the tribal drum about the general badness of open-source software, the free-culture movement, and entities like Creative Commons. Surely if the latter were really all that Cargo-Cultish they'd be so irrelevant that no one would propagandize against them.