Monday, May 28, 2007

Trust Wikipedians to Remember the Heroes

Today, I read about the importance of morale versus experience or expertise on the Wikipedia internal mailing list.

It was a memorial that nobody wants a historian that's spent 20 years studying history and archeaology digs, or a doctor that's spent 6 years studying chemistry and biology and 4 in practice. We'd much prefer a kid tell us what 4 out of 5 unnamed dentists recommend on a commercial site for a large corporation selling pharmaceuticals and spending money on motivational speakers to keep employee morale high.

As Stephen Colbert said in an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales:
"What I love about it is that it brings democracy to information. For too long, the elites that study things got to say what is or isn't real." - The Colbert Report, 2007.05.24

That's why it's far better to keep guys like Wolfie happy and doing a heckuva job than like cut-and-run Japanese government officials hanging themselves over a little $236,000 bookkeeping "fraud". Just ask Paul Wolfowitz. He'll tell you the $400,000 he received to step down as the World Bank president kept his morale and terrorist fighting productivity high.

No comments: