Was it von Clausewitz or David Sklansky who said "If I know something, and my opponent is unwilling or unable to learn that thing, I take my opponent's money"?
The Wikipedia\Google\Gutenberg Project learning "stack" allows me to process information in a manner orders of magnitude more efficiently than bookreading. I no longer feel guilty about not reading paper books because they are seriously obsolete.
Back in the early 1980s I was a baseball stats guy. As the only kid on the block with Street and Smith's annual preview I was at a huge advantage. Ten years later, with Bill James and rotisserie leagues, everyone was a stats guy. My monopoly was broken.
Same with trivia: prior to Trivial Pursuit, Bar Trivia games, and Jeopardy I was pretty good at trivia; ten years later *everyone* is good at trivia. Again, broken monopoly.
For centuries academia had a monopoly on information. Wikipedia helps break that monopoly, and it is no wonder the academic community has such antipathy toward it.
It's not what I have learned at Wikipedia over the past few years that amazes me; it's the knowledge that academics *know better* than the careerist pap they spew that really freaks me out.
So let the academics and the television watchers say what they will about Wikipedia. I for one will count my lucky stars that I have at my fingertips access to an unprecedented wealth of information.
This is the type of screamingly obvious axe-grinder of a headline that I would expect to see at a site such as Digg, or perhaps Fark.
Slashdot didn't earn its good reputation by greenlighting hypertorqued headlines wholly misrepresenting the content of the ensuing story.
We might be experiencing an age\morality gap here. I dislike the CBC and shady ISP practices, but not nearly as much as I dislike outright dishonesty sullying the pages of one of my favourite websites.
Slashdot Mirror
The Wikipedia\Google\Gutenberg Project learning "stack" allows me to process information in a manner orders of magnitude more efficiently than bookreading. I no longer feel guilty about not reading paper books because they are seriously obsolete.
Back in the early 1980s I was a baseball stats guy. As the only kid on the block with Street and Smith's annual preview I was at a huge advantage. Ten years later, with Bill James and rotisserie leagues, everyone was a stats guy. My monopoly was broken.
Same with trivia: prior to Trivial Pursuit, Bar Trivia games, and Jeopardy I was pretty good at trivia; ten years later *everyone* is good at trivia. Again, broken monopoly.
For centuries academia had a monopoly on information. Wikipedia helps break that monopoly, and it is no wonder the academic community has such antipathy toward it.
It's not what I have learned at Wikipedia over the past few years that amazes me; it's the knowledge that academics *know better* than the careerist pap they spew that really freaks me out.
So let the academics and the television watchers say what they will about Wikipedia. I for one will count my lucky stars that I have at my fingertips access to an unprecedented wealth of information.
This is the type of screamingly obvious axe-grinder of a headline that I would expect to see at a site such as Digg, or perhaps Fark.
Slashdot didn't earn its good reputation by greenlighting hypertorqued headlines wholly misrepresenting the content of the ensuing story.
We might be experiencing an age\morality gap here. I dislike the CBC and shady ISP practices, but not nearly as much as I dislike outright dishonesty sullying the pages of one of my favourite websites.