Interesting bit of synchronicity here: just a few days after my Wikipedia/Wikinews blog, there’s a story in Technology Review about Larry Sanger, one of the founders of the Wikipedia. Turns out Sanger is an epistemologist. A-ha!, as Spenser would say.

It’s an interesting article. The discussion of “nonbias” and the “revert wars” (what a noun!) reinforce my sense of Wikipedia’s basic philosophical underpinnings, further strengthened by the revelation (to me, anyway) that one of its prime architects is himself a professional philosopher. Yet even the trained philosopher seems to evade the assumptions behind his own creation. Early on, the article suggests that Sanger no longer doubts the possibility of certain knowledge. By the end, however, that possibility seems either rejected or bracketed:

To build a public encyclopedia, you don’t need faith in the possibility of knowledge, he says. “What you have to have faith in is human beings being able to work together.”

Cheery and humane sentiments, but they beg the question. If one doesn’t have faith in the possibility of knowledge, why would it matter if human beings are able to work together or not? How would you even begin to define or assess “working together,” or “human” for that matter? And if human beings are able to work together to, say, poison the environment, or destroy entire civilizations with a few missiles, how can faith in the possibility of human cooperation be a foundational assumption, a fundamental necessity, an implicit ethical absolute?