The Greatest Lie of Our Time: John Derbyshire and Kevin Myers on the Myth That Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia

 
[See also, by N.S.: “Wikipedia on Race: ‘World’s biggest encylopedia’ serves up propaganda” (American Renaissance exposé)]

Posted by Nicholas Stix

Gossipedia
By John Derbyshire
July 27, 2009
Taki’s Magazine

….

That's Wikipedia for you. They can say what they like about you, employing any level of sub-literacy for the purpose, and there isn't a darn thing you can do about it, even if you are patient and computer-literate enough to master their mark-up language. I had heard this, but just hadn't believed they are really so brazen.

I had heard it from, amongst others, Irish journalist Kevin Myers, who, at the slightest prompting, will give you a passionate forty-five minute harangue on the evils of Wikipedia.

There's a Myers column on the topic here, from which:

So who are the people who founded and run Wikipedia? I don't know, and nor have I any foolproof way of finding out, because the only way of doing so is by consulting Wikipedia itself: a hole-in-bucket solution to a hole-in-my-bucket problem …And so — do these wretched Wikipedia people ever lie awake worrying at the damage that the evil or the impressionable might inflict upon those who have been maligned in their uncontrolled and filthy internet gossip-shop, whose very power derives from the complete fiction that it is an "encyclopedia"?

I doubt it extremely: for of all the lies of our time, Wikipedia is surely the greatest.

[Read the whole thing here.]