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Wikipedia:replies
Some people have very strong reactions to Wikipedia. Some are nearly instantly hooked, and they love the idea; others think the idea is so absurd as not to require any serious consideration. There are a number of very common criticisms of the Wikipedia project, which we try to answer here. (See also the Criticisms page for exact quotations of prominent critics.)
Many of the criticisms levelled at Wikipedia are not unique to it, but are due to the fact that Wikipedia is, at bottom, a wiki. Many of the same objections have been made to other wikis.
Letting arbitrary Internet users edit any article at will is absurd
My prose
I can't imagine having my golden prose edited by any passer-by. It's mine, so why would I let others touch it?
- We (on Wikipedia) don't individually try to "own" the additions we make to Wikipedia. We are working together on statements of what is known (what constitutes human knowledge) about various subjects. Each of us individually benefits from this arrangement. It is difficult to singlehandedly write the perfect article, but it becomes easier when working together. That in fact has been our repeated experience on Wikipedia. Consider the following example:
- I thought I understood Gödel's incompleteness theorem pretty well, and since the then-existing article was short and incomplete, I decided to rewrite it. Since then, several people have chipped in, sometimes rewriting a paragraph, sometimes criticizing an omission, sometimes deleting parts. I didn't agree with all changes, but with most of them. No material is ever lost since Wikipedia stores all previous versions of all articles. So I reverted a few changes back. Overall, the article is now much better than I could ever have written it alone.
- We assume that the world is full of reasonable people and that collectively they can arrive eventually at a reasonable conclusion, despite the worst efforts of a very few wreckers. It's called optimism.
Cranks
Cranks are posting ridiculous theories on the Internet all the time. They will come here and ruin everything.
- So far, we have had relatively few cranks on Wikipedia, and it's pretty easy to just delete patent nonsense as soon as it appears on the Recent Changes page.
- There are websites out there that say the first moon landing was staged in a movie studio, or describe supposed perpetual motion machines. But you cannot correct those websites, no matter how wrong you think they are, because they are written by people who would never allow their work to be edited without their permission. They do not thrive on Wikipedia.
- This does not mean that idiosyncratic points of view are silenced or deleted; rather, they are contextualized by attributing them to named advocates. The more idiosyncratic an entry, the more likely it is to be modified. Because there is no ownership of the information on Wikipedia, an individual is compelled to contribute information that is convincingly true. Thus, cranks who cannot accept critical editing of their writing find they have no platform and leave; those who are willing to present their interests in less-biased ways stop being cranks.
Some cranks are very persistent. Someone could write up a crankish page on the Holocaust, and keep reverting it back to their version.
- Generally, partisans of all sorts are kept under the gun. Wikipedians feel pretty strongly about enforcing our nonbias policy. We've managed to work our way to rough consensus on a number of different topics. People who