User:Libertatia
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Wikipedia is, as a scholarly project, very badly broken. The result is that the quality of the articles tends to vary inversely with the possibility of controversy regarding them. A system which attempts to do without any practice of critical judgement and expertise on the part of the editors will 1) always fail to accomplish that "objective" state; 2) drive away expertise; 3) protect "gamers"; and 4) tend to produce a synthesis of the worst sources, rather than the best. Mediocre work, offhand references, popular works, works citing other work without adequate verification, partisan sources, ignorant smack-talking, etc.—all these things will inevitable outnumber the solid, critical material on any even slightly controversial topic. And Wikipedia lacks the filters to separate the wheat from the chaff. Or it possesses them in plenty, in the form of its editors, but it squanders the resource by turning editors into copyists. As a serious historian of the anarchist movement, I can only encourage readers to question everything they find on a site like this. Unfortunately, you can expect that entries will be at least as wrong as they are right.
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[Note: Well, I seem to be back at it, picking away at some of the worst misrepresentations here. We'll see how long it lasts.] Libertatia (talk) 19:19, 19 August 2008 (UTC)