You ask, “can you really get at some sort of impartial truth that will be agreed on by everyone by simply compiling more and more facts and edits?” The answer is yes. If all the editors act in good faith, and all the information is well sourced, and everyone is prepared to engaged in sensible and vaguely polite discussion on the talk page, then it works really well. Clearly there are going to be articles where people have wildly differing opinions, but here one just has to resort to quoting independent sources. “The Guardian said this, but on the other hand, the New York Times said that.” What, for instance, could be more controversial than Jerusalem? But the article is superb – a featured article in fact.

On the aesthetic point, I’m much more in agreement with you. I believe that a good encyclopedia should not only be accurate, but also stylish and entertaining. So I like to bowl the occasional googly or insert a hilarious aside, but these are rarely appreciated by the more bureaucratically minded editors. On a few occasions, I have worked quite hard on an article, only to have it ruined by some complete numpty with zero imagination. This is annoying because the first rule of Wikipedia is that nobody “owns” any article, however much effort you may have put into it. But I do wish that there was some sort of rating system for editors, which might enable one to pull rank over an inexperienced or anonymous editor. Instead, an ethos of strict equality reigns.

Obviously Wikipedia isn’t perfect, but I still think that it is way better than the published encyclopedias which are certainly not without error or bias themselves. On Wikipedia, you get the information in as much depth as someone has taken the trouble to provide. This does in turn lead to some imbalance. For instance, articles on pop stars tend to be extremely comprehensive. Now you might think that this is a bit frivolous, but of course the reason the articles are first-rate is because so many fans really care about them. So it’s kind of self-calibrating. Last but not least, Wikipedia is completely free. This makes it of potentially enormous benefit to the developing world. It also means that if you see something you don’t like, then you either have to fix it or stop complaining!

I haven’t edited Wikipedia for a while now, as I’m a bit busy at the moment trying to set the world straight, which I can see is going to take a little while. But I use Wikipedia all the time and would recommend it to anyone. Your article isn’t too bad. It tells us a lot of useful stuff, like your middle name is Choona. (Crikey, whose idea was that?) Apparently, you’re also very wealthy. (Couldn’t lend us a fiver, could you?) Finally, we learn that you are, “regarded as one of the most attractive MPs in Westminster.” Well we knew that!

Hope to see you at the Cambridge hustings. Exciting innit? Take care!

xxx