The F.U.D. Based Encyclopedia

In this article, Aaron Krowne responds to Robert McHenry’s anti-Wikipedia piece entitled “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia.� He argues that McHenry’s points are contradictory and incoherent and that his rhetoric is selective, dishonest and misleading. He also consider McHenry’s points in the context of all Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP), showing how they are part of a Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) campaign against CBPP. Further, he introduces some principles, which will help to explain why and how CBPP projects can succeed, and discusses alternative ways they may be organized, which will address certain concerns.

February 27, 2005 by Uncategorized 2

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2 Responses

  1. shoe says:
    February 27, 2005 at 6:00 am

    Why I am pro-wiki, mostly

    I do comment on this over on my blog in more depth, but the short version here…

    I like wikis. I do have some fear, uncertainty, and doubt about them, but truthfully, we should approach every source with a little bit of uncertainty and doubt. After all, Britannica has made mistakes. How many editors does an article at Britannica go through? Real, professional, credentialed editors?

    The truth is, if you’re using an encyclopedia of any type as a be all and end all source, you’re selling yourself short. And I never really feel comfortable without at least two sources backing each other up… If wiki backs up Britannica, great… If wiki backs up The Authoritarian Guide to X, a leading book in the field, and not Britannica, that’s fine too. That’s only reason to keep digging further.

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  2. deborah says:
    February 28, 2005 at 5:30 am

    nice link
    This is an excellent point-for-point rebuttal. What scares so many people about wikipedia is that — and this is non intuitive, at least for people outside the open source software world — it works. However odd you find it that wikipedia could possibly work, it just does right now. The social mores may change over time (as they did on the internet as a whole 10 years ago) and maybe it won’t work forever. And I still wouldn’t think much of someone who cited wikipedia as the authoratative source for knowledge. But at the moment, wikipedia is a damn good first place to look for certain types of information, and can help the reader know how to narrow down questions so they can then be further investigated in different sources. This rebuttal was a nice breakdown of anti-wikipieda arguments.

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