For some reason ... no jokes please ... seeing these Penn State morons riot in support of Paterno's enabling of a child molester DID make me think about Wikipedia. Maybe not that surprising when you think about it.

But it does bring up one point which I think is worth discussing. Wikipedia sucks. But in relative terms, does Wikipedia make the internet suck or does it just reflect the general culture of today? This makes me sound all old and gruff about the 'youth of today' but I'm actually pretty young and I still genuinely despise 90% of what the internet is about. Ok, but given that, is Wikipedia worse or better than the very very very low pathetic standard that is set by the internet, or by even a relatively-speaking privileged and well educated group like the Penn State students?

If it's the latter (Wikipedia suck reflects general culture suck) then the only hope is that someone gets in their time machine and kills Al Gore before he has a chance to invent the internet (is that morally right? Philosophers ponder...) The opposition to Wikipedia is then just a small scale localized bush war of a small tribe of natives who care about some small patch of land, while the whole continent is being swamped by these invaders. A lost cause, though one where a guy can make a semi-heroic (and ridiculous) stand against the tide.

If Wikipedia does suck more than the general culture then opposing the stupidity is a way of plugging a whole in a dam - which is not a useless endeavor. It serves a real purpose.

But things like this do make me think that it's really both (Wikipedia suck leads to real world suck which leads to Wikipedia more suck which leads to even more real world suck...) and they feed on each other and that's what makes it so unstoppable.

Anyway, I think I'm gonna go to the Schopenhauer article and put in "... was a Polish philosopher!" in there to make myself feel less pessimistic.

Wikipedia sucks partly for a very simple reason.

The majority of its wargamer subculture, and at least 50% of its administrators, are young males
attending high school or university. Arrogant young men, who are fond of sports and TV and comic books.

In short, Wikipedia is dominated by exactly the sort of drunken asshole college boys who rioted over Joe Paterno's firing.

For that matter, I honestly think that this incident shows that the United States is declining.
People are being fired every day, their jobs outsourced to China or India or Mexico. Their homes
are being repossessed because the banks sold them unsupportable mortgages, out of sheer greed.
Their nations' infrastructure is collapsing from age and lack of maintenance, while their government
cuts taxes on the rich and enacts ever more paranoid laws that subvert free speech and free
assembly. Through it all, Americans sit there and suffer silently.

But what gets them to riot? Joe Paterno was fired.
Lame.

You say this as if there were a time in internet culture when it wasn't like this. 20 years ago it was Serdar Argic or Kibology running rampant on Usenet, today it is 4chan, ED, and whatever the hot meme of the day is. All that is different is the scale.

You either adapt to it or become an irrelevant "get off my lawn" fist-shaker.

The Internet (and Wikipedia) is just a mirror reflecting what was always there.

No, no, no. It matters how the mirror is angled. And it's not one mirror but two of them staring back at each other. Otherwise, give up (the joke about Shopenhauer wasn't entirely a joke). Let me suggest Aesthetics which are over that way -->

I did not say that there was never a time in internet culture when it wasn't like this (hmm, the way I remember some parts of it, it wasn't but maybe I was hanging out in the wrong BBS(s)) What I said is that this one particular aspect of internet culture (and it may have been the aspect which accurately characterized ALL internet culture) has spilled over and taken over all of our ... normal "culture". I'm not sure the word "culture" is relevant here anymore.

But if you wanna have that discussion then sure, maybe there were several internet cultures at some point and the stupid ones won. Just like in real life. But in real life there's at least some breaks on the stupidity. I think, I hope.

I think you may be over-emphasising the importance and significance of internet culture in our wider culture, and certainly of Wikipedia. My wife mentioned to me that ‘that person who you talk about’, meaning Jimmy, was on radio 4. So after 8 years of my having mentioned Jimmy and pointing him out when on the TV, she now has a dim awareness of who he is. I’m still not sure she understands what Wikipedia is. Otherwise she is very connected. She knows every politician in every constituency, she knows the identity of any actor in any second-rate drama, as well as who they are dating, married to etc. She meets up with the witches’ coven every week to discuss goings-on in our community (I mean our actual neighbourhood community), the usual gossip and character assassination and spiteful stories. The younger members of the household, especially the female ones, use the internet a lot, but only Facebook, mainly for gossip and stalking, and character assassination. This is merely an electronic extension of what the older members do by other more conventional means. The whole neighbourhood is split into various cabals and factions, who repeat poisonous gossip about each other.

I don’t think Wikipedia has anything to do with this.

Anybody got some good Schopenhauer jokes?

Me too, although I never came up with any thoughts coherent enough on the topic to bother posting them anywhere.

When I saw the title for this thread, I thought it was going to say that Penn State was objecting to this Wikipedia article because it mentions the school's name in the title. I think that article shows that when it comes to current events, Wikipedia's model actually functions fairly well, for one thing because enough eyes are on the article to prevent a small group of editors with an agenda from swinging it in their direction. That doesn't make up for the fact that a good number of articles in Wikipedia are controlled by agenda-driven editors, and Wikipedia has no quick and easy method for dealing with it.