Wikipedia Weaselling

Andrew Orlowski has a good article at The Register summing up the whole Wikipedia/Seigenthaler libel fiasco.  Excerpt:

Two great cries have rung around the internet since the Seigenthaler scandal broke.

One is that Seigenthaler should have corrected the entry himself, and the other is that no source of authority can be trusted "definitively". That's a deliciously weaselly phrase we'll examine in a moment.

But both excuses seek, in the classic tradition of bad engineers blaming users for their own shoddy handiwork, to pass the responsibility onto Wikipedia's users.

[and even non-users!]

The blame goes here, the blame goes there - the blame goes anywhere, except Wikipedia itself. If there's a problem - well, the user must be stupid!

[...]

The first, and the most immediately absurd of these two defenses, is that since nothing at all can be trusted, er, "definitively", then Wikipedia can't be trusted either. This is curious, to say the least, as it points everyone's expectations firmly downwards.

If you recall the utopian rhetoric that accompanied the advent of the public "internet" ten years ago, we were promised that unlimited access to the world's greatest "knowledge" was just around the corner. This hasn't happened, for reasons cited above, but now the public is now being exhorted to assume the posture of a citizen in an air raid, where every moving object might be a dangerous missile.

   

Everything you read is suspect! You'd better duck!

Only a paranoiac, or a mad person, can sustain this level of defensiveness for any length of time however, and to hear a putative "encyclopedia" making such a statement is odd, to say the least.

Link: There's no Wikipedia entry for 'moral responsibility' | The Register.

Update: For more fun, you can read about this on the ever-earnest Wikinews!  "Author of Wikipedia character assassination takes responsibility".  The poor guy who did it is now marked forever as the "Wikipedia Hoaxer" (or at least until he deletes it, which I would do if I were him).  I find the Wikipedia "biographies" of everyday people a little creepy.

Previously: The First Wikitorial, Wikipedia: Just the facts!, Pretend News, WikiIrony.