Davos Newbies

I find Wikipedia tremendously useful, but I read it with my critical antennae tingling. Still, I like the healthy corrective Nicholas Carr provides to Wikipediaphilia: “Wikipedia is beginning to look something like a post-revolutionary Bolshevik Soviet, with an inscrutable central power structure wielding control over a legion of workers.”

Incidentally, you can follow an amusing World Cup minor Wikipedia tempest by looking at the edits on Arjen Robben’s page (which has been locked from further editing because of persistent vandalism). Robben seemed to take every opportunity he could to dive while his Netherlands team remained in the tournament. So a clever Guardian journalist added the following to the section on his personal life: “Robben is quite adept at chess and an accomplished SCUBA diver. He owns a pet parrot named Greg Louganis and collects model submarines.” The Robben nonsense shows both why some bureaucracy is probably needed and also why you need to maintain your critical faculties while reading Wikipedia (just as you should when reading Encyclopedia Britannica, by the way).