Anti-War Activists Tracked in Libraries by DOD

Kelly says:

Re:Tracking anti war activists through the library
“if you as a librarian count wikipedia as an authoratative source you do a disservice to the profession and your patrons.”

I was a librarian, BTW, but still do a big part of what is typical work in it now.

On what grounds do you make this claim about Wiki? (But then again, when do you ever seek foundation for any of your numerous broad, absolute-sounding and consistently utterly certain generalizations on issues susceptible to multiple interpretations and viewpoints?) Wiki has pluses and minuses, I am well aware. E.g., see this comment from Scott McLemee:

“The advantage of Wikopedia’s extreme openness is that people are able to produce fantastically thorough entries on topics far off the beaten path. The wiki format creates the necessary conditions for nerd utopia.” (He then gives a great example of this.)

He adds, “Wikipedia is not necessarily less reliable than more prestigious reference works. A study appearing in the journal Nature found that Wikipedia entries on scientific topics were about as accurate as corresponding articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/14/mcl emee

In light of this and many other varied viewpoints in Wiki that one could tap into faster then you can type “Google,” I don’t know how you can be so unambiguous, strident and black/white in your criticism. But I should know by now: that’s just you. it’s the way you do things. I forget sometimes.

I myself have seen things in Wiki that I knew were wrong, others I knew were right. Same goes for plenty of sources I’ve had to deal with in a long career. In case you have forgotten (but surely you knew or know this?): you evaluate the source, and there’s lots of ways to that. I know enough about the topic from other sources to enable to see that my “quick and dirty” lookup on wiki showed it had adequate information.

I’m well aware other orgs do domestic intel, and I did not “lump” them under the CIA.

And one is not an inverted paranoid for not seeing the sky is falling. An inverted paranoid is someone who is utterly and consistantly certain everything is fine, no matter how much compelling evidence to the contrary, which is always *denied or ignored* when it is brought into the picture. Denial and willful ignorance are key to this disorder. Perhaps we can rename it with a more friendly-sounding phrase: the “Severe Polyanna Disorder,” or “SPD.”