[Wikipedians] continue to add to, and the intellectually lazy to use, the fundamentally flawed resource , much to the chagrin of many professors and schoolteachers. Many professors have forbidden its use in papers. A professor who encourages the use of Wikipedia is the intellectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything . [ Gorman2007jer1 ]
Webster’s Third … is thus representation between covers of a cultural revolution. From its tendentious title – the work being neither Webster’s nor international, and only now and then a dictionary – to its silly systems and petty pedantries , the book is a faithful record of our emotional weaknesses and intellectual disarray …. Meanwhile the book belongs in every “culitvated” reader’s library of humor. I did not read every page, but at least once in every page that I read I laughed . [Barzun1963scw, p. 181]
… result from a presumption of normative force .
But this is in part a material constraint and a market construct .
In Good Faith Collaboration I organize discourse on Wikipedia as “friend are foe” via four themes:
The real magic … [is] as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. [ Kelly2006stb ]
The books in great libraries are much more than the sum of their parts." A snippet of information might be useful from Page 142, but knowledge requires an understanding of Pages 1-141 “or the text was not worth writing and publishing in the first place” [ Gorman2004ggm ]
Douglas Adams1999hsw wrote “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet”:
