Wikipedia:Randy in Boise

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Randy in Boise is the archetypal uninformed but relentless Wikipedia editor. Randy in Boise rose to fame in an essay about Wikipedia in Wired:

The Wikipedia philosophy can be summed up thusly: "Experts are scum." For some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War—and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge—get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment.^[1]

Wikipedia's policies are apparently all Greek to Randy in Boise. Hearing about something somewhere does not qualify it for inclusion in Wikipedia articles.

In The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols observed that:

Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.^[2]

References

^ Sjöberg, Lore (19 April 2006). "The Wikipedia FAQK". Wired. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
^ Nichols, Tom M. (2017). The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Oxford University Press. p. x. ISBN 978-0190469412.

[1] Sjöberg, Lore (19 April 2006). "The Wikipedia FAQK". Wired. Retrieved 21 October 2017.

[2] Nichols, Tom M. (2017). The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Oxford University Press. p. x. ISBN 978-0190469412.

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Wikipedia:Randy in Boise

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