Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-17/In the news
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Wow, the ReadWriteWeb article really chose a bad example and claims too much for Wikipedia. ReadWriteWeb asserts that before Wikipedia, readers "would have had no idea" about some nasty aspects of 19th century U.S. policy towards Native Americans. That's only true if readers limited their reading on the subject matter to out-of-print, 40 year-old sources like the one cited by ReadWriteWe. But there's been a revolution over those 40 years in how historians write about Native Americans; a reader without Wikipedia could learn the story after a visit to a library or bookstore. Wikipedia cannot claim any credit for this revolution, but we can help educate people about it. If anything, Wikipedia is often behind the times in this area, since too many editors prefer older sources that are freely available on the web to the modern scholarship which is still mostly to be found in books. —Kevin Myers 15:34, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
I envy Sterling's experience here. Perhaps he had crafted a walled niche for himself and shielded his sanity from all the wiki-hate. NVO (talk) 18:09, 20 January 2011 (UTC)