Take my comments for what they are worth, that being an anonymous internet reader/user.

The original “article” needs to be blasted for the simple fact that an “average” pc user migrating to Linux from another OS needs to really learn what the command line is all about, and how the system works.

I personally have a “love-hate” feeling towards Ubuntu and a few other variants of the Debian OS. While I understand that they are trying to make a distribution “Windows user friendly”, at the same time they are making it too much like Windows where the sudo command is “too easy” to use.

Go back to “Unix 101″ and think about what root privileges really mean. Using sudo gives a user too much “power” over the whole system. Ubuntu and the distros based on it make it too easy.

By the same token, Ubuntu has come a long way with making hardware “just work” with a default OS install. For that, I must commend them. Making that work just might get a few people to “ditch” paying for an OS, and actually use a free OS.

The bottom line is, if someone is going to write an “article” about a Unix-based OS, they need to have the facts correct, and they need to do some error-checking.

I never considered wikipedia to be a place where I could cite information from for a scholarly purpose and that isn’t what I want from it either. The moment I can cite from wikipedia is the moment I’ll know its completely useless.

Why not start wikischolar if that’s something that people want? Wikipedia is most useful for things that aren’t entirely ‘notable’.

Anyway, thanks for a brilliant article, you really hit home on exactly how I was feeling. Hopefully those who understand the complexities of the wiki discussions can stem the deletionist plague soon.

PS my two captcha words are conformity and subsume, how fitting hehe

And i promise, if you post a bit more frequently than either LHB, LHR, Piestar or jerkfaceplayhouse does, i’ll be a regular visitor.

To feel you are participating in something that is noble is great, but can any encyclopedia “codify” all knowledge? Very doubtful, especially in a climate where knowledge is growing at such a fast rate. I’ve noticed there is lots that is not covered by WP, especially if it does not interest the mostly young contributors. Really the internet is about information, not knowledge, so Jimbo’s “noble” sentiments may just be good P.R., it works for him and the vapidity of most mainstream media. Is WP useless, no? But it is not the solution either, just another project that shows the pitfalls of collaborating over electronic channels where people don’t have real relationships, IMHO http://alexroshuk.com/2010/02/10/wikipedia-dispute-resolution/

Frankly by now I firmly expect every edit I make to be reverted almost immediately, and a copied-and-pasted terse, arrogant, elitist message (naturally one masquerading as being friendly and helpful) being left on my talk page. Wikipedians aren’t the friendliest bunch, and I can count on one hand the number of times I made a non-grammatical edit that wasn’t reverted within five minutes (most of the time because my edits were considered “non constructive” for failing to adhere to Wikipedia’s asinine “readability” guidelines). And don’t get me wrong – it’s not that I’m some moron who doesn’t understand scholarly research. Wikipedia’s guide of style is just apparently moronic.

Wikipedia’s got a number of problems. (One of them is being almost totally dismissed by academia, which leads to an odd catch-22 whereby Wikipedia’s black sheep nature leads it to miss out on getting infused with the academics it needs to be taken seriously by academia. Though that’s not really the fault of Wikipedia or its editors so much as it’s the fault of academia.) The biggest problem – and the one that isn’t excusable – is what you’ve outlined above.

The truth (and the importance of the facts concerned) has to be recognized by being published in a source that has established a reputation for reliability, which is not directly connected with the subject at hand.

Sources don’t have to be in print, but they should be separate from the topic, and should involve input from more than one person unless the opinion of that person is, of itself, a topic worth mentioning in the article.

Expertise is not the most important factor; the developer may be an expert, but they are probably not the most reliable source on the topic.

After all, you wouldn’t trust the CEO of a company to give entirely reliable information on their company, would you? Nor would you trust a blog post by a random customer of that company. But you might trust a newspaper article that interviewed several customers and tried ordering something themselves. They’d probably only bother if the company was worth talking about, too.

That’s just how Wikipedia does things. Their system is designed to externalize expertise, so that reviewing editors don’t have to be experts themselves, but only have to know enough about what sources to trust. But it does mean that topics not covered by these sources can’t be included.

As Paul Houle says, if you don’t like how they do it, you can make your own wiki for your specific topic with different rules. I did this with WikiFur almost five years ago, and it has over 12,000 articles vs. ~130 in the same topic area on Wikipedia.

I also contribute to Wikipedia, but only on topics which satisfy their criteria. dwm might, but it’s up to you to prove it. This is only fair, since they’ve been enforcing these requirements on other topic areas for the last half-decade.

Please be accurate in your rebuttals.