User:GdlR

Having got used to Wikipedia as an often surprisingly useful resource, I found myself occasionally correcting typos or minor infelicities of expression. Getting a user id was just a courtesy to anyone who might wish to remonstrate, but who knows where it may lead?

I see Wikipedia as potentially a Glass Bead Game or, less fortunately, a Borgean magic library, a self-corroborating and self-perpetuating representation of a network of knowledge. There is a certain provisionality about the information: it is the best currently stored, but may change, and is not always complete or correct.

Accuracy of language and referencing determine the relative confidence an article earns from the reader. Where this is disturbed by a simple error such as a misspelling, it should be as easy as possible for the wikipede to fix this. Adding a link too should be easy, both internally to the Ouroboros and externally. And badly written passages may nevertheless contain useful information, when at length deciphered. Recasting the phrases to reveal it more readily is a kindness to the next reader, like a monk making a Gloss in the margin of a manuscript.

Harder to deal with is deliberate corruption of the discourse for, usually, political, national or religious reasons. This can be disregarded when blatant, but when subtle can produce a spin that may only be detectable by the lack of satisfaction and sense of cohesion provided by the information.

Optimistically, I believe in time the chaotic interactions of readers and text will smooth the pebbles, and the stories will stabilize into a consensus of many voices. The voices of those who protest, even if too loudly for my taste at times, often play a creative role in sparking discussion and challenging assumptions. This too is the sea that wears down the broken edges.