about "Know it All"

The New Yorker article "Know it All" by Stacey Schiff was a very interesting article for me.
It was interesting in the way that it portrayed the Wikipedia site. While it spent time talking about the acuracy of the site, what I found the most interesting was the way in which it portrayed the potential the site has an arena for philosophical dialouge. After all knowledge often is biased or presented in a biased way. Perhaps one of the most striking statements to me was the one that compared the rate of errors between Encyclopedia Britanica and Wikipedia as being 3 for every 4.
I have myself used this site as a preliminary stop to find out information about a topic. A always looked at it like asking people what they knew about a subject, such as a co-worker or fellow student. While I have found many of the entries to be accurate in the information they present it was interesting to learn about some of the governing rules the site is now using. While I think it is important to regulate some of the information posted when people are editing each other just for fun or spite, I also see the benefit of having a completely unfettered dialouge about lets say the Federal Reserve Bank and how it has been used by bankers to enslave countries in debt by printing money out of thin air and charging govrenments interest to do what they do for free as opposed to it being the great institution that has saved us from an unstable economy(did they forget that's what they keep telling us they do). I should be careful I don't go on some tangent but oftentimes "history" is told in a biased light that shows only what the author wants to be seen. Seldom is it comprehensive and total in its scope. Here is where I see the beauty of a site like this; People can show opposite "truths" of the same event or topic. After all, the truth is generally some where in between the two extremes.
What I also found interesting and didn't know was that the edited pages stay in an archive that can be viewed. Another thing I never knew was that people try to gain status on this site by the number of edits and entries they make. This is quite an interesting concept. Where else but the internet can one reach fame by the sheer quantity of time they spend on a subject regardless of the quality? Well I won't touch that question lest I offend the reader.
Perhaps the most compelling part of the essay was the way in which the "wikipedian" was portrayed. The notion that they may be individuals who are dedicated to knowledge while being skepical of the esablishment was unexpected. Granted they weren't all portrayed in this light, it did seem that it infered some were of this caliber.
All in all this was an enjoyable article with what I found to be a fresh perspective of the possible benefits of the site