QUOTE
That's Wikipedia for you, the intellectual bathhouse of our times, in which you can swap personal fluids and fatal viruses with complete strangers.
I treat Wikipedia with the same intellectual respect I would a football chant. I am in a minority.
In the past decade, Wikipedia has produced the greatest "information" revolution in history. But what actually is a "fact" in an internet-world that consists of a cyber-rabble bawling malevolent gibberish along with scientific truth? Who knows which is which? And who are the thousands of people who write the Wikipedia entries? Do you know any of their names? Thanks to the internet, we have travelled back to the intellectual anarchy of the 17th century pamphleteers.
Plagiarised Wikipedia quotes, copied and pasted, are now universal media-fare. The word viral takes on a new meaning: the sewers are no longer underground, but are pumping their bilge into the food-fair. And as we wade knee-deep in all this mixture of nourishment and effluent, who knows what is good and what is toxic rubbish?
In other words, freedom needs consensual rules -- otherwise the outcome is the freedom to tyrannise, to bully, to marginalise, to cheat, to oppress. This is what we are already seeing in the sordid universe of the free internet, with its depraved galaxies of hysteria, its solar systems of malice and its malevolently circling comets of vindictive dementia. What happens when a really powerful force is able to mobilise such cosmic hatreds? History -- 1789, 1917 -- supplies the answer.
The force is strong with this one.