Wikipedia: the trash midden of the future
Interesting perspective on the usefulness of Wikipedia - not so much as an encyclopedia, but rather a resource for those amongst our progeny who decide to study us. Kind of a backhand slap to the Wikipedians, too: "history won't care if you're right or wrong, but your quaint biases and loquacious misinterpretations and wrongheadedness will be so wonderfully useful to the grad students of the future." Might oughta be right.
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Buckethead
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Minor side note: I didn't
Minor side note: I didn't know what a "midden" was and in fact don't believe I'd ever seen the word before you used it, but I got the general gist of it from the context of your post.
Funny coincidence, though: I was finishing PJ O'Rourke's "Peace Kills", and he used the word, too. So I looked it up, and it meant roughly what context had led me to believe it would.
Since odd things like this allegedly happen in threes, I'm now waiting for my dog, or the neighbor's parakeet, to use the word.
"The Wikipedia is the most
"The Wikipedia is the most detailed, comprehensive, concise, culturally-sensitive record of how humanity understands itself at any precise moment in time"
Which, with the addition of "culturally-sensitive", renders it simultaneously interesting and useless. It also makes oxymoronic the claim to comprehensive or concise treatment of, well, anything.
Undeniably, it is a record of how a particular segment of the world understands itself at any precise moment of time. But let's not confuse that with objective truths.
You are forgetting that 99.44
You are forgetting that 99.44% of the people who study this sort of thing have not the slightest regard for the concept of "objective truth." So, they are unlikely to confuse anything, let alone this, with Objective Truth, however construed.