>I have been a longtime skeptic of the Wikipedia but am easing up on them a bit. There is now a process for vetting updates to the more controversial topics, and the presence of various viewpoints acts as a built-in self correction mechanism. Would I rather have everything written by scholars, a la Brittanica? Sure. But that's an expensive, time consuming process. And scholars have their biases, too.

Well I have a strong worry that anything that's "an expensive, time consuming process" is going by the wayside these days, some faster than others.
And the "news" business is one such entity, and I can imagine the day that our "news" is fed to us second-hand, bloggers to 'newsroom' to us. Bureaus are expensive. Fact-checking is expensive. Editing is expensive.
I understand some fact-checking has already mde its way to India. I imagine that editing is not far behind.

What we seem to have here is the willing trade-off of "good quality" to apparent quality, in the name of cheapness. The main problem with that is that anything that is "free" wins by default. Then the free ones will duke it out and the winner will get away with even less quality.

We have already justified too much away in the name of it being expensive. Soon we will get - and deserve - exactly what it is that we pay for!


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>>There's a really credible site. Anybody can enter anything there, regardless of the facts. Try a reputable source of statistics....
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>>>>Its not that the US is any more criminal or not, its that we have a greater population, ergo more criminals.
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>>>Actually it is, from Wikipedia:
>>>"As of 2006, the incarceration rate in prison and jail, in the United States was 737 inmates per 100,000 or 1 of every 32 adults. [2]. For the most part, the U.S. rate is three to eight times that of the Western European nations and Canada."
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>>>> A price we pay for freedom.
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>>>Yet more bunk. There is no connection between degree of freedom and an increase in the rate of criminality. In fact the opposite. The true western style democracies, except the US have most of the lowest crime rates. Here is a graph showing the murder rate by country.
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Map-world-murder-rate-un6-9.svg