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Reblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
annierau@wikis.world ("annie rauwerda") wrote:
My letter to the editor made it into this month's Harper's!! tldr: Wikipedia is great and degrading it is not so great
Attachments:
- Ben Lerner's winding tale about a man who deploys a phalanx of false accounts on Wikipedia in order to defy consensus brought to my mind the countless Wikipedians who have held tight to the pursuit of truth while the semi fictional Lerner, by his own admission, lost his grip..... With each keystroke, my fellow editors and I have contributed to the largest and most accessible -- albeit still imperfect -- source of information humans have ever had. Take the software engineer in washington who has corrected the grammatical incorrect phrase "comprised of" about 90000 times, the librarian in Alberta who doggedly patrols for copyright violations, or the California product manager who guards pages against content that glorifies Nazis. one teenager spent hours each day editing articles about the 472 subway stations in NYC until every one of them had a comprehensive entry. A white-haired retiree I know spends his days cycling around the Tri-State Area, taking freely licensed photographs of infrastructure, and sometimes letting me tag along. Though some of Wikipedia's contributors manipulate the platform, just as Lerner's avatar did in his worst moments, the vast majority of us are shrewd, delightful, and ordinary people operating in achingly good faith (remote)
