User talk:CryptoDerk/Fasoldt

You state:

• Al Fasoldt strongly implies that Wikipedia claims to be an authoritative source -- it doesn't.
• Al Fasoldt compares the idea behind Wikipedia to that of rape and counterfeiting.
• Al Fasoldt insults me by claiming I do not care about honesty.

Thank you for your emails; Now I know not to consider Al Fasoldt an authoritative news source, honest, or better than rape or counterfeiting. :D It's obvious he has made a mistake in print and is too damn proud to publicly correct it. --Golbez 02:20, Aug 30, 2004 (UTC)

Thank you for summarising this. I agree errors abound in all media. The great selling point for me is that Wikipedia allows them to be put right, and is also the means where original research writing can find a place without the hassle of the peer-review mechanism operating in the scholarly world today. The way Wikipedia works is that peer review occurs after publication and is transparent. All modern online encyclopaedias are weak on historial topics - they have to be to keep them in bounds. Think how much we rely on the 1911 Encyclopaedia for info now cut from the current Britannica. My field is the history of techology, and I am apalled at the number of respectable books on British C19 history which do not mention manufacture or engineering. If one is lucky, railways and steamships might get a footnote somewhere.Famous engineers like Brunel don't even make it to the index. There was a highly acclaimed TV series a year or two back on eighteenth century British history which did not mention the Industrial Revolution. The unrelabilty of source like these are never pointed out in the reviews, of course. No doubt our librarian friend who started all this would not think they were flawed since they have gone through a 'scholary' editing procedure.

My beef about the Syracuse guy is his pejorative language, though there is not a lot we can do to change that! Apwoolrich 05:51, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia may or may not lag behind traditional encyclopedias in accuracy, but it's certainly ahead of the press, which prints ludicrous things all the time. One newspaper cited on Wikipedia:Press coverage said that Wikipedia's founder was Howard Rheingold. Who in the world is that, and what is their excuse for not knowing Wikipedia's founder when that information is easilly available online, on Wikipedia itself? Isomorphic 21:19, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Additional Comments by other Wikipedians

• I think that to be able to better understand the power of Wikipedia, Fasoldt should start to contribute to it. He will soon find that Wikipedia is full of POLICE-LIKE wikipedians, that quickly delete copyrighted material, delete inappropriate pages, correct mistakes, typos, etc. Some articles probably have been reviewed by more knowledgeable people than any article in ANY encyclopedia. I guess wikipedia still has articles that need improvement or that have errors, but it's getting better by the minute. As of now, it seems to me that it is already the largest encyclopedic body of work in the world.--AAAAA 23:21, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)