That Wales couldn't fufil his expressed desire to unmask the perpetrator sounds less a case of "too hard to do" than one of "can't be bothered, mate".

So we come to the question of responsibility. We've promised to deal with the ethics of Wikipedia before, and it's no longer possible to ignore in the elephant in the room, so we must.

The Reg excoriates Wikipedia.

This is a somewhat complex issue. I find myself agreeing with some of the positions this author takes, but I still find Wikipedia a useful tool that should continue to exist.

For instance, I agree that it's a little presumptuous to call it an Encyclopedia, given it's obvious non-authoritative nature. And yet, most of the articles I've read are reasonably valuable and accurate, even if they aren't authoritative.

Also, I think the author's contention that it's unreasonable to expect people to treat information sources with skepticism is, well, unreasonable. Of course, at some level we seek authority, otherwise, we wouldn't be confident about anything. But I don't see anything wrong with asserting that users should read everything with a grain of salt. It may be a dodge, but it's not false.

The potential for Reputation to solve some of these issues is one that I don't need to state here, but I'm not sure the rest of the world gets it yet. We've reached a point where "authority" is a diminished commodity, for better or worse. We've reached a point (and blame politics if you like) where even "experts" are suspect because you don't know their motivations. I *do* feel like i have to do actual research to discover the reality of *any* situation. I remain unconvinced, however, that this is a bad thing. Were the newspapers of the 1900's so authoritative? So accurate? Better than some wikipedia entires, perhaps, but less so than others, with an added concern - Presumption of Authority. I'd rather live in a world where all sources are considered suspect, and human beings use their own reason and an array of resources to arrive at a true picture, than a world in which sources X, Y and Z are considered Truth and no one looks much beyond them. It may be scary and confusing to live in such a world, but dammit, the world is scary and confusing a lot of the time. I find it extremely powerful that we find research and critical thinking to be the tools for quelling our fears and making sense of our world.

Presumption of Authority is one of the most fundamentally dangerous attachments we can make, and it's a major reason why Reputation, and robust tools for assessing it, can be ever so much more powerful than handing our trust to a small number of presumptive kings over our knowledge landscape.