למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

The whole notion of the universal encylopedia is one example: Wikipedia bursts triumphantly on the scene just as everyone had pretty much abandoned hope for the memory of Mortimer Adler's grand project to revive the encyclopedia.

Obviously, without NPOV you'd fill Wikipedia with advertisements and polemics and propaganda; NPOV is a useful club with which to chase the cranks and the cooks. But the New Journalism is about to celebrate its fiftieth birthday, and I think it's been a full generation since people really believed that a neutral point of view was either possible or desirable.

One consequence is that links on wikis tend to be nouns, noun phrases, or commands.... Because the link always leads to what it names, wikis are attracted to transparent sincerity: what you see is where you go, and what it means is just what it says.

Another consequence is that it's hard to use links ironically, lyrically, or metaphorically in a wiki. A link to SomePage goes to that page; it can't easily lead to a commentary or a rebuttal or an alternative or an analogy or an anecdotal illustration of your point.

If these arguments were true, we'd expect wikis to thrive in pedagogical environments, where clarity/brevity/sincerity rule the day and where irony and lyricism might confuse students. We’d also expect wikis to thrive in areas where meanings ought to be univalent, such as product reviews, employee policy handbooks, and project management reports. On the other hand, we'd expect wikis to be less suitable for fiction, poetry, scholarship, and science.