Well ranted, sir!



On 15/11/2013 00:49, Tom Fine wrote:
> http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/ 
>
>
> I've stated plenty of times what I think about "crowd-sourcing" and 
> "collective" things online --  generally not useful if facts or 
> accuracy or consistency are of any value, or if you don't like wasting 
> time. This article shows that Whacky is more screwy than I imagined. 
> The latest brushes I've had with Whacky are a whole series of 
> incorrect recording and release dates for various albums, 
> contradicting what's on the album cover or CD booklet, contradicting 
> well-researched discographies and/or contradicting Billboard articles 
> that anyone can go find with a very brief Google Books search. Whacky 
> seems to have just mass-imported all the misinformation in Gracenote 
> and freedb, which are also crowd-sourced cluster-f's.
>
> Basically, fact-based knowledge is not up for debate nor is it 
> "democratic" -- it is either factual or it is not. ACCESS to that 
> knowledge should be as democratic as is practical. The interweb gets 
> it backwards. Every fool has a "voice," under the guise of being 
> democractic. So what happens is bunch of foolish noise, and facts get 
> lost in the shuffle. Talk to any teacher and you'll hear about a 
> generation coming up who can't tell the difference between a fact and 
> an opinion. "New paradigm" indeed!
>
> -- Tom Fine
>