I do agree with you in principal, but let's take my little ramshackle argument and continue a little further, shall we?
A desire to explore facts is *not* a reason to publish something. It is a reason to experiment. You are thinking of a desire to share that knowledge once discovered, which falls under my "wants to be heard" category. Still, I've no doubt that was a false dilemma. I was trying to cover only the most obvious cases.
As for your second point, there will probably be a balance between biases. There are people who are going to be biased both ways, and, although neither is trustworthy, the result of both sets of work is very likely going to be a lot closer to the truth than either alone. It is unlikely that everyone who contributes to an article is biased in the same way, unless the contributers mostly come from a group of people who are likely to be biased (e.g. the contributors to Wikipedia are very likely to be biased about the GNU Free Documentation License), but given a diverse community (which Wikipedia no doubt has) this is likely to be kept to a minimum.
As for your last line, it's a nice piece of rhetoric. Maybe we should pay the Wikipedia contributors, so they are no longer "armchair quarterbacking". |
