Wednesday, February 08, 2012

The New York Times on the Wikipedia blackout

A nice piece here by Cary H. Sherman. It happens that he is chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents music labels, so clearly a possible bias there. But he is fundamentally right about the problem of a very large website like Wikipedia which is exploiting its status as a supposedly neutral and independent to make a self-serving political point.  Platforms such as these have real power which is equal to, if not greater than the power of the traditional news carriers, as I argued earlier here.

2 comments:

Anthony said...

Well, the problem is that Wikipedia claims to be "neutral". Wikipedia is not neutral. But being neutral is not good thing.

Encyclopedias should be objective and unbiased. But they shouldn't be neutral.

Anthony said...

Of course, the bigger problem, which leads to the poor patch of attempted neutrality, is that the articles aren't signed. Neutrality is an attempt to make up for the lack of accountability.