Florian Cramer on the German WikiWars and the Limits of Objectivism

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Description

"The Neutral Point of View is often considered a pragmatic tool, a necessary consensus model for unifying divergent editorial voices into one article and, ultimately, one encyclopedia. It is less widely known that Ayn Rand's "Objectivism", with its combined belief in free market capitalism and fully objective grasp of reality, provided the initial inspiration and philosophical foundation of the Wikipedia project and its policies. The 2009 crisis of the German-language Wikipedia, which originated in controversies over an article about a sexual abuse victims non-profit, is a model example for the limitations of the consensus policies and engineering cultural objectivism beliefs. By implication, it also reveals limitations of open source authoring models."