The Wikipedia is One of the Most Wonderful Wonders of the World
Especially, because it is a collective voluntary process. I love it more than Linux (for one thing I don't use Linux). I do resent the Wikipedia for one reason -- it makes it harder to impress people with extensive pointless knowledge -- everyone who can look things up in the Wikipedia is astonishingly knowledgeable by the standards of say 2000. I know people who similarly resent spell checkers.
The amazing thing is that the Wikipedia is fairly reliable. I now know of two errors in the Wikipedia. The first was in the article on "Ricardian Equivalence." It was asserted that, if there is Ricardian equivalence then, like a temporary tax cut, a temporary increase in government spending does not cause an increase in nominal aggregate demand. Since full professors at top universities made the same howler, it isn't all that shocking. But I was alarmed.
Now I have found another error in the Wikipedia. I quote from the article on the Arrow-Debreu model
In general, there may be many equilibria; however, with extra assumptions on consumer preferences, namely that their utility functions be strongly concave and twice continuously differentiable, a unique equilibrium exists
Nothing is perfect, but the Wikipedia is wonderful.
I added the text in square brackets which you might find between the two quoted sentences. This is my first contribution to the Wikipedia. I have no idea what will happen next. posted by Robert
permalink and comments12:36 AM