I met Bob McHenry, former editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, when I did some consulting for them a few years back. He’s a wise, engaging, fellow, and he did me a huge favour by agreeing to do a keynote at the first-ever XML conference in 1997. But I’m profoundly disappointed by his vicious thrashing of the Wikipedia, which descends (literally) to toilet invective. I cannot understand how a perceptive human being can fail to see the beauty. Although Britannica is a pale shadow of its former self, McHenry presumably still has some insights at his disposal that he could offer to this brave band of people trying to create a new thing in the world. Instead of standing back and throwing mud.
