Sanger’s Politics of Knowledge

Larry Sanger wrote a very thoughtful article about the meaning of the wiki movment… I will comment on it in a few days….

Constructing the Digital Universe » Blog Archive » The New Politics of Knowledge
The New Politics of Knowledge
July 31st, 2006 by Larry Sanger

Since my own essay critical of Wikipedia’s “anti-elitism”, and intensifying after Jaron Lanier’s more recent essay touting Wikipedia as the prime example of “online collectivism,” the amazingly huge, wide-open encyclopedia project has become the locus of a new debate over the politics of knowledge.

Wikipedia has become the flag ’round which a certain kind of Internet partisan has rallied. These partisans are not necessarily, as Lanier rather wrongheadedly claimed, “collectivists.” What they are, are high school and college students tired of being talked down to by their teachers, open source devotees, cranks resentful of professionals, privacy and free speech advocates, old-fashioned anarchists, and (indeed) epistemic collectivists who give often undue weight to the so-called wisdom of crowds. And on the other side, Wikipedia’s most vocal detractors include professional editors, journalists, college professors, librarians, some (not most) bloggers, and victims of Wikipedia’s sometimes defamatory biographies. The New Yorker’s Stacy Schiff ably represents both sides.