GetWiki:Feed(news, feed, original, Proteus)
Pseudopedia: Many of us can accept that there is false information, non-verified, inauthentic, highly questionable, false information
all over Wikipedia. A wiki with so many hundreds of thousands of pages is bound to get some things wrong. The problem is, that because Wikipedia has become the "AOL" of the library and reference world, such false information and incorrect definitions of terms become multiple incompetences, propagated to millions of potential readers world-wide. We must ask: How many students have relied on false information from Wikipedia? Is the fact that it's a
wiki relevant to the question?
The Messiness of WikiDemocracy: The WikiEmbrace of democratic values has led to obvious problems, where for example, the fame of Wikipedia has brought along the dreaded "AOL Effect". Floods of new users, armed only with the name of the site and its basic ideal, unskilled in the community's sometimes irrational norms, challenge the democracy of the Wiki by their very entrance, and force the Wiki to focus on itself rather than its content. Most of this "challenge" is innocent enough, and though it is not limited to Wikipedia, it results in a re-erection of barriers to communication, where webpages on the Wiki become protected, where "anonymous" editing has to be managed, traced or blocked, and where much more time is spent discussing, rediscussing, and rediscussing the all-important "community", rather than discussing and presenting the content - it was the content which was the mission, or the "BarnRaising".
New Philosophy: Out of necessity, 21st century thinkers are finding philosophical inspiration from diverse sources. The most common objection new students have to learning Philosophy is to being forced to read the works of "old, dead, white men". The newer thinkers participating in philosophy are not all white, nor all men, nor are they all from the United States or even from the Western nations. Along with a
global economy has also come a global community of thinkers, with diverse, multi-cultural cross-currents of traditions.
Wreads (Margins): For the most part, real behavior proceeds at the subconscious or inarticulate conscious level of its subjective meaning. The person behaving in a certain way "feels" this vaguely, rather than being explicitly aware of the source of his behavior. Mostly his behavior is governed by habit or instinct. Only occasionally, and in the uniform behavior of great masses often only in the case of a few individuals, is the subjective meaning of such behavior, be it rational or irrational, raised to the level of true consciousness. Really effective, that is, truly conscious and clearly meaningful behavior, is in reality always a marginal case. (Max Weber,
Basic Concepts in Sociology, p. 54).
(last updated by Proteus, 8:43pm EST - Sun, Nov 11 2007)
