Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet.

And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things.

But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.

The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.

I would say this is all we really should reasonably expect from our knowledge consensus systems. In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving.

It’s a bit hard for me to imagine something better (in practice). It’s easy to want more or feel like reality doesn’t live up to one’s idealism.

But we live here and now in the messiness of the present.

Viva la Wikipedia!

> In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving.

Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message. As long as we are using leaky abstractions - which means all the time - we can't capture Truth. There is no view from nowhere.

Reading your comment, my mind is immediately awash with the endless sea of memories I cherish so dearly of discussions I've had with economists, psychologists, computer scientists, social scientists, political scientists, and of course let's not forget the physicists, chemists, biologists and mathematicians, and every scientist ever in fact, in which they, at all times, without fail, insisted on avoiding dogmatic truth!

Not like those hair-brained philosophers!

Sigh. One would have to possess an impressive level of ignorance in the history of philosophy and science in order to hold such a view. What would Raymond Smullyan, or Bertrand Russell, or Henri Poincaré, or who knows how many others, have to say about this remark, I wonder.