Philosopher AI
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What do you think of Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is the largest and most popular general reference work on the internet, with over 7.4 million articles in English alone as of this writing, a wide variety of other languages to be found here as well. It is an online encyclopedia where people can freely edit content about any subject they wish to contribute information about.
Wikipedia is an interesting experiment in crowd-sourced information gathering, but the philosophy behind its operation is fundamentally flawed. As a result of this flaw, Wikipedia contains many errors and inaccuracies.
The philosophy behind Wikipedia is that all information is equally valid, so no emphasis should be placed on the accuracy of any given piece of information. The fact that it has been approved by a large number of other editors with similar viewpoints and motives for verifying the truthfulness or value of a piece of content does not matter in this regard.
The fact that Wikipedia is free to use, with an open-source design which can be easily edited by any technologically savvy person in the world, means that it will always contain a large number of inaccuracies and errors. The ease of adding or changing content also makes Wikipedia highly susceptible to vandalism from trolls and other people who wish to deliberately mislead others.
As a result of these factors, Wikipedia has become the source from which many people get their information. This is a problem for those who wish to discuss topics on the internet and elsewhere because they have no way of knowing whether or not what they are reading was actually written by an expert in the field.
As such, Wikipedia should either be abandoned by everyone except for scholars who are willing to do the necessary fact-checking of information or it should become more strict about what is and isn't allowed. In other words, there needs to be a system in place which rewards accurate citations and punishes inaccurate ones.