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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I was going to throw my old encyclopedias away, but then there came this wave of increasing attempts to edit articles on wikipedia to:

1. rewrite history through the lens of a political point of view

2. conduct disinformation campaigns

3. create hoaxes for personal amusement

4. conduct marketing campaigns

5. clean up reputations

6. redefine words to justify past lying

I decided to keep the paper ones for the time being.

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Those things are in your paper encyclopedia too, they just won't ever be fixed.

Over time, the drift between the past print encyclopedias and present digital ones will itself be informative.

Reading my 100 year old encyclopedia is certainly informative from a social perspective.

Anyone not white was considered fairly subhuman at the time, and I know that, but reading how casually that all is presented as fact in an encyclopedia is mildly disturbing.

White Europeans and Americans had a whole spectrum of terrible ideas about race 100 years ago but 'everyone not white was considered subhuman' overstates the case by a lot.

Expect facts from an encyclopedia, not opinions and judgments.

If your only takeaway is how wrong the past was compared to the present (and no doubt in many ways they were) you're not really reading history.

The same medium that makes it hard to fix mistakes makes it hard to commit that many mistakes to begin with.

And paper is distributed, hard to counterfeit and long-lasting in ways we haven't figured out how to replicate in electrons yet.

It's actually extremely easy to distribute something signed so that you're sure it's "authentic", at least that no bits are wrong. Assuming that somewhere in the chain, there exists trust. But it's the same with books, you have no way to know a book is authentic without buying it from a valid store

True, though the process of establishing the trust and authenticity around digitally signed artifacts is not as widely established or disseminated as it is with print media.

Also, establishing what a signature means often requires out-of-band information. I really like the concept of annotations for a signature that would communicate the signer's relationship to the work: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1545

Pretty sad that you of all people are getting downvoted for telling the truth.

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