Of course only one person can create a Wikipedia entry but everybody can help develop it. Ideally... donating to contributors would be as easy as "Liking" something on Facebook. But it's important to understand that donating to contributors and valuating an article aren't necessarily the same thing.
Just how important is the benefit principle as a concept? It has to be at least somewhat important or else other editors would have challenged its creation and voted it off the island.... so to speak. But it stands to reason that not every economic concept that has an entry on Wikipedia is equally important.
The benefit principle and
supply and demand are both important enough concepts to deserve their own entries on Wikipedia. But this really doesn't mean that both concepts are equally important. Does it matter which concept is more important? Does it matter whether we know just how important each concept is? I'm pretty sure it does matter. It would allow people to prioritize how they allocate their limited time to developing those entries and learning about the concepts.
Elsewhere in this forum Occam's Banana recently posted a thread with lots of information about
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Clearly Occam's Banana is under the impression that we should have/know this information. Why else would he take the time or make the effort to share this information with us?
But if somebody is just starting to learn about Austrian economics... should they learn about Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and his work before they learn about all the other Austrian economists and their work? Personally I think that Mises and his work is more important than Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and his work. Clearly it's beneficial to familiarize yourself with both of their work but I would recommend starting with Mises. Does anybody disagree with me? No? Maybe? Yes?
What everybody should agree with is that is that nobody has all the time in the world to spend studying about free-markets or anything else. This is why it matters that everybody should be able to quickly and easily discern, at a glance, just how important any Wikipedia entry is. This would allow people to correctly prioritize how they spend their limited time. And in order to ensure that the importance of any given Wikipedia entry is correctly calculated... everybody should be free to easily allocate any amount of money to each and every entry. Valuating an entry should be as easy as "Liking" something on Facebook.
Therefore.... here are the two main things that everybody should agree with...
1. Everybody's time is limited
2. Values are subjective
Not only do I love free-trade... but I also love plants. So I was pretty happy when, in a plant forum that I participate on, somebody posted
a thread announcing that they had launched a website to facilitate plant trading...
http://www.onlineplantexchange.com/
I was somewhat surprised though that most of the comments in the thread weren't very supportive. People were concerned with the spread of pathogens. It's not that I don't think that pathogens are an issue... it's just that... in the grand scheme of things... the benefits of free-trade are greater than the costs. Anybody who disagrees would have to make the argument that Europeans should have never discovered the Americas!
In my post in that thread I made pretty much the same argument that I'm trying to make here. It's wonderful to create a site that facilitates the sharing of information... but it's infinitely valuable to facilitate the valuation of the information that's being shared.
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