Here's Some news!

[Joe Right]

I just thought you guys would like to read this. It just came out today. Tell me what you think and I will tell you what I thought about it.
Heres the whole thing.---> Article


August 9, 2006
Is Wikipedia the Death of the Online Individual?

Technology gurus like Lawrence Lessig and Brewster Kahle
showed up at this year’s Wikimania conference (The Chronicle, August 7) to celebrate Wikipedia’s dynamic growth. But some technologists insist that the site’s ascent is a cause for concern, not exultation.

Among those skeptics is Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist who coined the phrase “virtual reality” and spent time as the chief scientist for Internet2’s engineering office. In an online essay, “Digital Maoism,” Mr. Lanier makes the case that Wikipedia is at the forefront of a disturbing Web trend—a tendency to value anonymous communal thought over individual intellect:

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force.

“A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references,” Mr. Lanier continues. “It is also an expression of personality.” And Wikipedia fails on that account, he argues. Articles in the encyclopedia routinely cull information from other Web sites, according to Mr. Lanier, but in doing so they remove the context that made those sites valuable in the first place.

Wikipedians would probably take issue with Mr. Lanier’s suggestion that the site is devoid of personality or context. Debates over the content of articles, after all, are waged by contributors on Web pages that any visitor can view. But Mr. Lanier’s broader vision—of “a frantic race taking place online to become the most ‘Meta’ site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites”—could apply to search engines and blog aggregators even more than it does to the open-source encyclopedia. —Brock Read
Posted on Wednesday August 9, 2006 | Permalink |