There are three ways in which Wikipedia is very counterproductive when it comes to having conversations. 1) Sometimes it is not correct, but is taken as gospel. This is rare, because errors that are encountered when this happens tend to get fixed, but it does happen; 2) Wikipedia, with it's strident empirical approach and narrow range of training by participants (entire fields of study seem to be very underrepresented among the writers and editors) does not have a fully developed handle on all of the important aspects of scholarship, so certain kinds of information are essentially excluded or reduced to insignificance when they should not be; and 3) Wikipedia has served as the substrate for the codification of certain interlocutory behaviors which in turn have subsequently become inappropriately fetishized conversational tics.

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