User:XOR'easter/sandbox

Menand

Louis Menand's entertaining column ("Wikipedia, “Jeopardy!,” and the Fate of the Fact", 23 November 2020) misrepresents Wikipedia in a few ways. When it comes to citations, peer-reviewed journals and blogs are not treated the same. Blog posts, social media and other self-published sources can only be used in restricted circumstances. In medical matters, a blog would virtually never be an acceptable source, and even many peer-reviewed journal articles would not make the cut, as Wikipedia values review articles that summarize and contextualize over initial reports that might not hold up. Menand is correct to say that Wikipedia functions as "in essence, an aggregator site", but long experience has taught its community that there need to be standards for what is aggregated.

Menand describes Jimmy Wales as the project's "grand arbiter", but the vast majority of day-to-day decisions about when editors get the boot are made by the volunteers themselves. Community members who successfully run a gauntlet of a nomination process become "administrators", who can then block editors temporarily or permanently, as well as impose various types of editing lock-outs upon individual articles. Similarly, when Menand writes that Wales "doesn't care whether some of the editors are discovered to be impostors", this elides the fact that "pretending to expertise" is only one kind of imposture. One way for an editor to get booted and their contributions deleted is to be unmasked as a paid shill.

The "neoliberalism applied to knowledge" bit is a nifty turn of phrase, but after all decentralized communities of letters long predated Hayek, and one could just as well say that the Wikipedia project provides knowledge "from each according to their ability"; perhaps the jargon of economics is more catchy here than it is illuminating.

I think this was a letter I wrote to the New Yorker and never got a reply to?

References

Prof. E. McSquared's Calculus Primer