I posted the video so you could inform yourself
And I followed up. I even checked it out on Fox News. And, ya know what? He said what I said, not what you said. He said that it's mainstream, establishment, IOW, straight on things that aren't politically controversial and biased towards the establishment on partisan hot buttons. I can find nothing from him about the taxonomy, which, may I remind you, was the topic on the table, not the content or the write-ups.
He said it can give a “reliably establishment point of view on pretty much everything.”
“Can you trust it to always give you the truth? Well, it depends on what you think the truth is,” said Mr Sanger Since when has an encyclopedia been anything other than establishment? Should an encyclopedia be other than establishment? Is not the purpose of an encyclopedia to define the establishment understanding of a subject? Just as a dictionary is establishment. It has mainstream slang but if you want street slang, you look elsewhere. The essence of encyclopedias and dictionaries is that they are curated.
Sanger is apparently of the Truther school of "thought." Don't know if he was Truther back when Wiki was established or not and how that related to his vision of it. Might be an interesting story there were someone to research and tell it.
It makes sense to me for Wiki to be establishment and note here and there where there is not proof or consensus but notable controversy, which is one step more populist than traditionally curated. Maybe that's a viable notion or at least once was, or maybe not. It has always seemed to me anecdotally that it does that. The problem with old-fashioned encyclopedias was that they were always out of date, so that's not really viable, either. I'm not inclined to make a formal study of it to validate my perception of Wiki. It serves my purpose if I want to do a quick check of something. Life is too short to put a lot of effort into questioning things that seem to work "close enough for government work."
My pearl for the day is that there was a time when there was no question about the alignment of "establishment" and "reality" and anti-establishment meant anti-stodgy, fresh, not anti-reality. |
