Akkam’s Razor

Kuro5hin user lsanger was an early contributer and architect of Wikipedia - an “open-source” encyclopedia. In his post, he laments on how the very structure of the project has threatened one of its core tenents, that of reliability.

The problem is that anyone can make or edit content, irrespective of experise or lack thereof. As anyone who has been a member of an internet community can atest, trolls can be a troublesome nuisance. Ignore them and they prattle on - address them and you give their arguments validity - suppress them and be prepared for cries of elitism and censorship.

As the title of this post states, just because you have an opinion doesn’t mean you’re right. We don’t let people who stayed at the Marriot last night perform brain surgery, and we don’t let internet bloggers write foreign policy. One of the earliest internet sayings was “on the internet no one knows you’re a dog”. Well, on the internet, no one knows whether your opinion on any given topic is valid. Since a meme spreads very quickly across the internet, bad ideas can gain traction, and their repitition can move them from speculation to fact. The internet as a whole, and Wikipedia, at the least, needs to address this.

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