I think that WikiHow is potentially the single greatest thing to emerge from web 2.0 – if it takes off in the way Wikipedia itself has, it’s difficult to state quite what a widely useful resource it could be. Of the course the problem with the latter – that the former pleasingly avoids because the same issues aren’t at stake in the lose practical knowledge that WikiHow offers – is that it’s simply not reliable. Of the philosophical, sociological and political content on there, much is simply far too brief and superficial, presumably because the people who have the time and inclination, as well as the ability, to do it otherwise are few and far between. The articles that generate the most interest are inevitably those which are sites of ideological contestation. For instance, go look at the histories of the anarchism and anarcho-capitalism – as well as the anarchism and anarcho-capitalism page that the original dispute eventually spawned – where the loftier aim Wiki has of being an encyclopedia is reduced to being a catalogue of the views of people who choose to argue about them at a snail’s pace online. Is this unfair? I can see why someone might accused me of subscribing to a naivé conception of knowledge and truth, such that I’m counterposing the ‘objective’ truth of the ‘real’ encylopedia to the ’subjective’ mess of the young internet pretender. I’m really not doing this though. I’m just saying that if something is very consciously put forward as a contribution to an ongoing polemic on both sides, this gives us an a priori reason to take a critical (and cynical?) distance from the truth-claims it makes.  The dispassionate pursuit of truth doesn’t guarantee that truth is what we get, however passionate participation in a long and polarised conflcit does, ceteris paribas, give us a reason to be sceptical about the grand claims to truth which inevitably manifest themselves (not least of all because it’s reasonable to assume that they are, at least partly, a function of the desire to win the argument!).