User:Brianhill
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A couple of quotes that seem appropriate for the Wikipedia experience, one descriptive and pessimistic, and one prescriptive and optimistic:
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." --Bertrand Russell
"Think like an organism, behave like a cell." --Preston Jordan
[edit] Philosophy and experience that guides my membership in the Wikipedia community
My personal areas of expertise and contribution are physics, software and environmental issues. Articles on environmental issues are often controversial. In such articles it is important to quote and reference a wide range of sources. Then diligent readers can go to those sources and draw their own conclusions from the science and reasoning, and equally or more importantly, the values and personal experiences that they bring to the subject.
While it requires additional effort on the reader's part to wade through a range of sources, conclusions drawn through this effort are more compelling than even a very good exposition of a consensus position.
The Wikipedia has gotten amazing over the years despite all the real and hypothetical problems with a wide-open collaborative environment. This is a surprising and inspiring testament to the goodness and intelligence of people in general — or at least the particular subset of people that have figured out how to edit a wiki page. Even on controversial and rapidly developing subjects where it is intrinsically difficult to separate substance from rhetoric, and where one might imagine that complex protocols would be required to mediate between many contributors, the combined efforts of intelligent and self-critical people are resulting in an information source that is becoming higher quality and more comprehensive than any commercial or hierarchical system.
Brianhill 04:17, 21 August 2007 (UTC)