Khepri wrote:
> It was something I caught the tail of on the radio...
>
> Scholarly types whining about the quality of the content or something....:)
Ah. Chances are good you're referring to the Encyclopedia Britannica
guy(s) using fallacious reasoning to try to make Wikipedia look bad.
>
> Open source knowledge is a great idea I think...but it seems it will
> always be open to this sort of criticism...
Alas, that seems to be the case thus far. All this "open" stuff still
looks like some weird "hacker culture" renegade thing to the Pointy
Haired Bosses (and their spiritual brethren) of the world, and as such
they're highly mistrustful. They're used to making buying decisions
based at least 50% on slick packaging, and don't trust anything that
makes itself understandable to the layperson. Meanwhile, those who make
their living and reputation by hoarding knowledge, obfuscating it from
the public, and holding positions of perceived "authority" all feel very
threatened by the suggestion that an intellectual commons can
approximate, and even exceed, their specialized knowledge.
These are people for whom knowledge has become a product, rather than a
pursuit. We're talking about people like the devout Derrida acolytes in
the halls of academia who issue grand statements from their ivory towers
and feel they must maintain their rarified positions by destroying the
reputation and credibility of any up-and-comer. Thankfully, there are
academics who are very much still on a path that values the knowledge
over the traditionally attendant reputation, rather than judging how
well they "belong" by how few people are allowed into the circles in
which they travel. That's sort of a tangential issue, though.
In any case, between academics like these and those who play similar
games with the arcane arts of "producing" software, there's a lot
against which the various open knowledge projects of the world (Linux,
Wikipedia, et cetera) must struggle to achieve widespread recognition of
value, but as long as the law isn't turned against the free exchange of
knowledge to the point that such projects can be stopped in the courts,
it'll survive and grow. Like a free market, free knowledge just works
better.
-- Chad
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