Here's the thing. Perhaps it would be useful to live by the strict standards followed to securely verify PGP signatures, but nobody in practice does. There is actually very little you can seriously trust. For instance, take encyclopedias.

Let's take a look at the one on my shelf. It's made by some company called "Plaza & Janes", who I honestly have no idea who they are. It was bought after a door to door salesman (whose name I ignore) convinced my parents years ago it was a good thing to have for our homework. Apparently, it's endorsed by the University of Salamanca. While not very far from Madrid, Istill can't say I know what kind of place that is. I have no clue of what this endorsement means, either.

Surely it's been written by some competent people, though. Or so I would hope. The small list of names is completely useless to me. Two of them look like they were involved in the production of the text, the rest did something else. Surely this huge thing couldn't have been written by just two people, and if it was I doubt they know that much about it. A list of trusted experts is nowhere to be seen.

Why do I trust the contents of this thing? Well, after thinking about it, the best I can come up with is the same reason why I trust my bank's website: because it's got a signature from Verisign (who I hear bad things about), and Microsoft (who I dislike) trusts Verisign and included its certificates on the Windows CD, and I trusted Microsoft not to screw up... that is, not really sure why.

Okay, enough about that. Now let's try Wikipedia instead. It's clearly visible it's a collaborative project. It is writtenby a huge number I never heard about either. And it even has big disclaimers about the content.

However. First of all, I like the fact this is all being made clear to me. Second, unlike with the paper encyclopedia, I can actually develop some trust in it, oddly enough. For instance, I can go to the talk page and see if there's some controversy. I can also see who made what modifications and develop some trust in the authors. Granted, that's one messy and lengthy thing to do.

Third, I can actually complain, discuss, and/or fix things. If it turns out my paper encyclopedia says something that I consider obviously wrong, I have no recourse. Oh sure, I could try calling the producer, and wouldn't get anywhere, except ifit was some extremely outrageous issue the press would decide to discuss. It's not like bias is hard to introduce. Take religion for instance, plenty room there. Say, I'm sure there are plenty people who believe an encyclopedia should point somepeople think God doesn't exist. But my encyclopedia doesn't seem to include that, it merely describes the concept and various gods.

Secondly, I have never experienced this anti-elitism you speak of. Maybe you went looking for it and found it, only after looking hard because you wanted to find it. I once corrected a bunch of articles written by a particular guy, because they weren't factually correct. I was an expert in the particular field of the articles and I corrected him. At first he was hesitant to believe me, but I proved my points on the Discussion board of one article, and he gained my respect. He also had a background in physics, and was a smart guy, and thus was able to understand the corrections I had made to the articles. Lastly, I have written several articles from scratch, which almost no one has touched. Clearly I am the only expert in those areas so far. I don't see anyone deleted my articles or doubting my expertise.

Contrariwise, it is clearly the case that while everyone may have their opinions on an issue, the vast majority of people are too ignorant to justify their certitude. Heck, half of all drivers are below average, but rather fewer than that seem to think that they are. (Source: various statistics with varying degrees of credibility that universally support the statement. Heh.) At a minimum, the desired goal suffers from a bootstrapping problem: there's no objective way to detect expertise. The only alternative, it would seem would to be allow users to specify who they think experts are and allow them to only see articles and edits by their supposed experts.

A particular failure of the wiki is the absence of a mechanism for representing that there are sharply divided expert factions for an issue and representing that a collection of (sub-) articles presents a survey of viewpoints. I.e., not sections in an article, a set of (sub-) articles referenced or transcluded into an article indicating multiple viewpoints. In this context, users may then select their expert(s) and only see positions espoused by their expert(s). Similarly, articles can be marked as "accepted" by a user's delegated expert and therefore is qualified for presentation to the user.

In other words... There's no objective mechanism for recognizing experts, especially on a topic new to the encylopedia. There's no mechanism for nonrepudiation of entries that may or may not have been submitted by the person signing them. There is not even a clear definition of expert. It would seem that the best that can be done is the specification of "my experts" or "my delegate for refereeing articles".

Any article from Tech Central Station should be treated with some discretion. Tech Central Station is a Republican PR out fit. They are described in disinfopedia .

Wikipedia cult member: "Doing X will not produce a perfect reference work, therefore, it's of no value.  And anyway, if there's an error in Wikipedia, it's your own fucking fault for not fixing it."

Larry writes "nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia, because they will--at least if they are editing articles on articles that are subject to any sort of controversy--be forced to defend their edits on article discussion pages against attacks by nonexperts."

This argument, while accurate (the more that experts have to "waste" their time on this, the less they will participate, which is bad for Wikipedia), rubs many (including myself) the wrong way. My instinct is to think, "certainly it sucks to have to defend one's contributions, but how else can we assure quality? If the hoity-toity experts are unwilling to put in the same amount of effort that i am, there's not much that we can do, now is there?". This response, while also accurate (I think), ignores the reality that it really is a loss to the project when experts don't participate.

But there's another way to look at this. It's not just a matter of pampering the elitist experts so that they deign to contribute. Imagine that you own Wikipedia, and that an expert is one of your employees.

If you had a credentialed expert who agreed to spend a certain number of hours working on Wikipedia each week, you would want them to spend their time adding content that they consider important, and on making corrections to important but non-obvious errors that few others would be likely to detect.

You would NOT want to spend their time repeating the same arguments over and over about things that they are quite sure are obvious. Other people are qualified to take on this task. Since there are only a few experts, it is most efficient to have each expert focus on the things that only they can do.

I think the only thing that escapes this condition it's mathematics, as it is a pure mind creation with a specific set of rules (logic). Others may not agree :)

So why can't Wikipedia be a multi-view encyclopedia?
This encyclopedia should be as diverse as the internet is.

Surely it's going to be source of debate and some "bad/unpopular" memes are going to infiltrate (racism, religious fanatism, intolerance), but it can be balanced with proper commentary, and some sort of poll where people can tell what opinion is more useful/accepted (this even may change in time).

When did things change from trying to produce the best encyclopedia/news/whatever possible to religiously adhering to some idea of equality?

Many of the posts responding to this message either exhibit the same blind religiousness and simply refuse to consider the possibility they might be wrong or are confused about the basic issue.  Also I would point out it is completly hypocritical to critisize the article poster for not having enough expertise as an argument for allowing completly random people to add their own 2c to an encyclopedia.

The problem, at least as I see it, is not about having low barriers to entry.  I fully agree that every joe schmoe should be allowed to submit his edits.  The problem is that the wiki community refuses to consider a tiered editing struture to approve these edits.  Admitedly coming up with the proper review system is hard but take a look at wikinews.  Every time someone takes a bunch of time to propose a tiered structure a bunch of people protest that it is anti-wiki.  At the very least the wikipedia community needs to start addressing these points in a substantive matter instead of just accusing the position of being anti-wiki.

I'm not sure if I should take all those questions of the sort 'who decides what is elite' seriously.  Admitely there is a real issue here, but it is clearly a solveable issue since we manage to do so succesfully for scientific journals and real encyclopedias.  However, It seems that many of these comments indicate a deep comitment to a sort of relativism about expertise (it's kinda like theology for the wiki-philosophy).  So I will give the simple answer and hope that it satisfies everyone who isn't dogmatically commited to the opposite viewpoint.

Basically you have two choices for who determines expertise.  The first is a trust web in the style of PGP.  This web is seeded with a couple of known wikipedia developers who then give editorial status to others they find trustworthy.  The other option is to let the community as a whole decide who is worthwhile.  Implement some sort of rating of edits/contributions and give those people who get a high enough karma editorial status.

To comment on your essay:

I think wikipedia has grown too big to be directly altered by any single person (maybe with the exception of Jimmy deciding to close it after all, but I don't know if even he can do it anymore).

But it can be affected by something that it needs - by knowledge. I think that while creating an elitist project basing on wikipedia could initially lower the user-base overall expertise, the long-term results could be worth it, as long as the resulting articles are freely available to be copied back into wikipedia.

I wish You would start something like that, although I know that probability is low.

The other thing that could possibly affect it would be some periodical philosophical insight from you, provided you could write it knowing there will be no immediate results, but flaming and whining.

This essay seems like a good starting point, but it needs some polishing to get rid of preaching and wounds-tending. Would you agree to put it on wikipedia?

I believe that there are two distinctly different kinds of knowledge, history, and models.

History is what has happened. This type of knowledge is propagated by original sources, documents and the like. The key question with any history is, "Has it really happened?" To answer that question, you must know how the document originated. A document written by a college student in the 1970s about the industrial revolution is entirely different from a document written by an actual participant of the industrial revolution who only attended the equivalent of elementary school. The college student's version might have higher educational credentials, but it is less important because it is lacking important credentials of a different sort, such as first-hand experience. With history, who wrote the document and what they knew matters. The exact providence of a historical fact is very important, since there is no independent way to verify a historical fact other than different sources. Once it is wrong, only by careful research and examining the credentials of many documents can a historical fact be proved wrong.

Wikipedia has many such historical facts. In the Crushing by Elephant article there was the fact: "The last person to be officially executed in this fashion was put to death in India in April, 1947." Is this true? I thought it sounded somewhat implausible, so I tried to verify it in a library. I was unable to verify it, so I removed it. However, it is possible that the fact might be true, and I was merely unable to find a source for it. This is a problem with most historical facts. Wikipedia is currently very weak at dealing with this type of problem.

The other type of knowledge is models. (Don't get too hung up on the term. Others might use systems, methodologies, or theories to describe what I am calling models.) These consist of assumptions and their consequences. There is a quote that "All models are wrong, some models are useful." For example, Newton's model of physics is wrong when high speeds are involved, but, for say, building a car, it is very useful. The economic model of supply and demand is wrong for certain goods, but it is still useful for much else. The only possible problem is that a model might be inconsistent (or two or more models might be mutually inconsistent). The basic method for finding problems in models is to understand them, and then think about them. I have discovered mistakes made by people with PhDs (in physics) about physics by listening to a lecture, and then thinking about it (though, to be honest, the PhDs found more of my mistakes than I found of their mistakes). The other half of a model, its usefulness, is determined by testing it against the real world.

Wikipedia has many models in it. There are physics models and economic models and models of computers. Sometimes, mistakes are added (mistake) by ignorant editors. However, after thought, these can be corrected by less ignorant editors (fix). The key fact here is that Patrick did not know any more about elasticity that I did, he just thought about the example I gave, and realized that I had made a mistake. For all I know, he could have no credentials whatsoever, but he fixed a mistake.

My key point is, that for much knowledge, what matters is not the providence of the information, but the explanation that goes with the information. If the expert actually knows more than the layman, then the expert should be able to explain the flaw in the layman's reasoning and why the expert's method is better. If no expert can, then I consider the "expert's" knowledge highly suspect. Modeled knowledge is well served by Wikipedia, since it truly can be reviewed by non-experts.

So, historical knowledge will be poorly served by Wikipedia in its current form, but modeled knowledge will be well served by Wikipedia in its current form. I believe that this type of knowledge is far more important than historical knowledge. A vigorous debate between laymen and experts on equal footing will improve both Wikipedia's and humanity's overall modeled knowledge.

As for historical knowledge, Wikipedia could use some work.

• It's a meritocracy (if there's such a word). Good code wins. Bad code gets out.
• Patches are reviewed. No anonymous, unchecked code.
• It's elitist to the extreme. Try to post a naive comment on any of the main dev lists out there, and you'll know for yourself what does 'flaming' means.

1. Only allow those with accounts to post.
2. Accounts initially start off with a score of 0 on each topic.
3. Accounts earn points (or lose points, going negative) as their owners demonstrate knowledge/expertise/understanding of various topics.
4. Below a certain level, edits need to be submittted for approval. Below another level, individuals cannot post on a topic, due to their demonstrated ignornace of it.
5. Below a certain overall average level, individuals cannot post at all, because they've demonstrated they aren't being constructive.
6. Above a certain level, individuals are considered competent, supercompetent, or experts in various areas.
7. When there are arguments in a field (e.g., in economics, between mainstream economists and Austrian economists), to support objectivity, editors and contributors should not take positions, but rather explain the positions of particular sides. They should be judged on how accurately they explain these differences, and compare and contrast.

Suggestions for improving this seem to involve some sort of "approval stamp" on articles. Unfortunately, in today's complex world there is not simply a single objectively true point of view. Many commentors have recognized this, and pointed to the impossibility of choosing who the expert(s) are when they frequently disagree.

I submit that in the spirit of open decentralization, there CANNOT be a single approval group or entity. Instead, there must be an allowance for multiples approvers, each with their own points-of-view (and yes, possibly agendas -- we all have them, may as well admit it)

Anyone should be able to set themselves up as an approving authority. We've got a zillion of them in the world today -- ANSI, ISO, ECMA, FDA, etc. Let any individual user decide which point of view they want to view as authoritative. Let me say that when one exists, I want to see articles that have been posted or vetted by the Republican approvers. Or some group from the AMA, or whatever

Excellent article.

But I question one of your most basic premises: that Wikipedia works. When judging the success or failure of any project, you must compare your achievements against the project's goals. Having a web site that gets lots of hits and lots of contributions is not a measure of success.

Pretend Wikipedia doesn't exists, and imagine you were embarking on a new project, a collaborative web-based encyclopedia. What would your goals be? There are four key words here: "free", "collaborative", "web-based" and "encyclopedia". Each of these suggests a set of goals, aka "requirements" in the software project-management world.

Here's the problem. I think Wikipedia has achieved three of the four goals: It's free, it's collaborative, and it's web based. But let's look at the fourth. What are the requirements for an encyclopedia?

An Encyclopedia is:

• Comprehensive: Articles on every subject of interest to virtually anyone.
• Complete: Each article covers the topic
• Accurate: Each article is accurate and factual, or where there are issues of controversy or opinion, the various points of view are laid out clearly.
• Indexed and cross-referenced: Articles on related topics are cross referenced, and there is a way for authors to identify keywords for an index.
• Readable: Articles are written with a tone, language and style that can be understood by the typical person, i.e. a person who is otherwise unacquainted with the topic.

I will assert, and I believe your own article states the same, that Wikipedia simply fails to achieve the status of "Encyclopedia". It is complete, comprehensive and indexed, but it is not accurate or readable. It does not meet the minimum requirements you would set for such a project.

Here's where I disagree with your reasoning:

...one can make a good case that, when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven.

You are assuming that only specialized topics have reliability problems. I disagree: I believe every topic in an encyclopedia is a specialized topic. Whether it's an extreme specialty like mine (cheminformatics), or a widely-known topic like art, history, biographies, there is always somebody who is more knowledgeable than the rest of us, who should be given special recognition.

Knowledge is fundamentally elitist. It's not something you get to vote on, because 99% of the people don't have enough expertise in 99% of the topics to even vote responsibly.

Scientists have dealt with this issue for hundreds of years, via the peer-review process. It's not perfect, there's lots of politics, back-stabbing and so forth. But by and large, the good science makes it to the top of the heap, and the bad science is weeded out.

I'll echo the sentiments of many other respondents to your article: I would never bother writing for Wikipedia. I'm an expert in my field (cheminformatics) and have written extensively on the topic. When I found Wikipedia, I thought, "Hey, this is cool! Maybe I'll write an article..." But when I looked at what was there already, I discovered it was based on some of my writing without attribution, was badly written, and, more importantly, there was no mechanism by which I could say, "Hey, I happen to know something about this field." That was the first and last time I used Wikipedia.

I believe that Wikipedia could be a success if it added a peer-review process with the following features:

• It incorporated a voting mechanism or peer-review process. When an article was changed, the new version would be available, alongside the old, and readers could vote. The new article would only supplant the old when a threshold was reached.
• There must be an "override" mechanism where authors or groups of specialists could appeal to management to override the vote (i.e. when a group of "trolls" or a commercial attack out-voted the genuine specialists on a topic).
• Specialty areas would have moderators. The moderators' votes would count much more heavily than the general public, and a moderator could override votes, ban certain readers from voting, etc.

I really hope that Wikipedia, or its successor whatever that may be, is a success one day. It's such a great idea. But until we come up with a mechanism that recognizes that all knowledge is specialized, it's going to be an elusive goal.

Craig A. James

It would seem that a mechanism would have to exist to easily and conveniently make editorial decisions based on the ranking of contributors.  Some sort of weighted voting I suppose.

This is not my own theory, but one that I have grasped on to question my own competency when I get too cocksure.

Some of my favorite quotes that I believe are relevant to this discussion (i.e., I'm admitting I'm not the expert here!):

"It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense."

-- Miller, W. I. (1993). Humiliation. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press)

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

Another point Larry makes is giving too much credence to vandals.  I think folks like SOLLOG are tolerated even when they begin to harrass project members, and that their rights are emphasized even when they begin to drive legitimate contributers out.  Read the near-megabyte of archives of the above page (and some material on that page has been removed.  

Sollog in particular has been making threats against the site co-founder Jimbo Wales.  He has made homophobic and/or outright bizarre remarks on talk pages and made efforts at self-promotion of his self-alleged paranormal abilities.  He has linked his own anti-WP site, which includes site co-founder Jimbo Wales' personal information and previously included character assassination on Jimbo's family, from various articles in a very likely attempt at pagewank on behalf of his various commercial sites, including an adult site focused on death.  If you want links to the above, which I will not promote, please by all means contact me using the username "windrunner" and the domain "gmail.gooGOL.KOM".  

lack of public perception of credibility, particularly in areas of detail

the dominance of difficult people, trolls, and their enablers

If you take that away, Wikipedia will die. Period. The experts-only encyclopedia has been tried, and it didn't work. You can't mess too much with the current system without breaking it.

There are several ways this can play out:

1. Wikipedia continues as it is, well-known but marginalized and maligned. Result: A good encyclopedia, but not as good as we'd hope.
2. Someone creates a fork of Wikipedia, reviewed by experts. Result: Wikipedia gets competition. Perhaps it receives less editing. Efforts are split, and again, things aren't as good as we'd hope.
3. Wikipedia changes its policy. This would be a real gamble. Wikipedia's strength lies in attracting masses; if you give administrators too much power, will they use it well, or will they become tin-pot Napoleons and drive away people who make clueless-newbie edits?
4. A miracle occurs.

You can view the contributions of Larry Sanger's account on the English Wikipedia. Since December 12, 2002, he has made exactly one edit to a Wikipedia: project page (which he summarized in his own words as "Don't much like categories"), and a few random contributions to his user page. That's it.

The gist of your article (IMHO) opinion comes across as that (accurate) specialized knowledge can be marred, under wieght of (innaccurate) mass opion.  I can appreciate the sentiment, but let me provide you with a counter example which in my opinion is a far greater threat to legitimacy (and usefulness) to the masses.

Read this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_photography

The article is non-encyclopediac at best, you may not be able to tell, allow me to explain why.

The author who submitted the article first, has also put pictures of himself, links to advertisements for texts which the same author has written, regarding his own original 'research'.  This is blatant violation of NPOV policy, and hardly in the spirit of an encyclopedia.

Follow the links and you will find that they are largely uninformative.  Take a look at the link to another article (by the same author) apparently having something to do with a type of equation, you won't be able to find that term in Mathworld.

This is an example of someone writing an article about a 'specialized field', which does not actually exist, and yet (despite my attempted changes) no one really seems to mind.  Yet the original author benefits by free advertising to his texts and citations from an (mostly otherwise) reputable source.  Part of it doesn't really matter, since I doubt anyone reads the article anyway, but there seems to be a problem when it can be demonstrated that the rules can be broken, as long as it is for 'specialzied knowledge' that people don't really care about.  I abstained from any further comment on this family of articles, as my opinion could only come across as biased.

Remember you tried this ? Let me quote from the wikipedia entry: Nupedia was an online encyclopedia project founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia lasted from March 2000 until September 2003, and is mostly known as the predecessor of Wikipedia. Nupedia was characterized by an extensive peer review process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to professional encyclopedias. Before it ceased operating, Nupedia produced 24 articles that completed its review process (three articles also existed in two versions of different lengths), and 74 more articles were in progress.

Fact is, people contribute to projects if you make the projects fun and the barriers to entry low. Nupedia was exactly the oposite. Getting a single article published there meant going trough a process with something like 379 steps, and by the way in no way shielded you from having to argue the merits of your article with the "unwashed masses". Instead it made what on Wikipedia is easy, effortless and rewarding into a real chore.

It's a wonder anyone ever went trough with it at all, 24 articles after more than a year online says everything about the appeal of such a project.

So, let's see if I have this straight. Wikipedia is this experiment in social democracy. Now, with the Internet, we can have this wonderfully democratic process, and it will result in something that's just great, and everyone will love it, and everything would be just peachy.

Only it doesn't really work out that way, which you would have known if you had talked to any teacher at all over the past 6000 years.

And so, now, you hope that some of those people will just voluntarily agree to fix Wikipedia and make it all better, for free, because it's not as if they haven't been trying to keep their own enterprises going duirng the period when you were bitching about your taxes, and pretty much all of the other time for the past 6000 years when people were sometimes trying to burn them down and stuff.

Is that, basically, it?

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.--Terry Pratchett

is there really a problem? what is this disucssion really about? can anything useful come out of it?

it boils down (again) to technological issue, and its implamentation. expert opinion are free to formalize their own environment, using the same modified tools.

Wikipedia, is above all else a discussion tool.
i really dont understnad the problem, or rather i think the focus here is in the wrong direction.

Let the Ivy leagues invest some of the hugh cash amounts they have in a wikilike site, and then we will judge the merit of it all.

To complain about something without doing anything about it, (while having the capability) is really so unproductive. It is also tends to make the arguments pretty weak.

Encyclopedias, reference books, textbooks, and journals have inertia; they have a certain resistance to change and they emerge in a quantized fashion, representing the an opinion of the state of some subset of knowledge average of some period of time to average out the noise. Because these sources have this inertia they serve as a cultural calibration standard, a "trail of bread crumbs" to that we can culturally assess our position and move on. Wikipedia can never serve this function and so will always receive a certain disdain or lack of respect in that it can never serve as a landmark. Even the metaphor of a snapshot is too generous because (on a cultural scale) the content is too malleable.

There are really no experts, certainly not as related to the mass cultural opinion. You can have two professors with identical training, identical publication records, and identical credibility within a field who would write completely opposing articles; this happens in courtrooms daily. If a person is the first to have an idea, he will always be shouted down by the masses because (based on Thomas Kuhns writings) science does not progress by accumulation facts, it progresses by the political struggle and marketing of ideas.

All writings in Wikipedia are the result of someone's political views and cultural ideologies. Everything is based on someone's perceptions.

So the "problems" with Wikipedia would be lessened if:

Wikipedia stated clearly with a disclaimer (linked at the top and bottom of each page) that listed exactly its purpose and clearly expressed the assumptions that do not hold for wikipedia.

There are no experts.

There is no truth for wikipedia to asymptotically approach.

If there were truth that was free from personal ideology or motive, Wikipedia would not approach it because it is free to float with cultural whim.

One thing that might be better than constant editing is to simply publish all the articles. If there are two opposing views on a subject, publish them both and any debate. This would require a minor (technologically speaking) increase in storage, but the resulting work would have some inertia. Many academic journals are headed in this direction now. A good system of organization and links would insure that neither article would be seen as definitive, but both together would be seen as valuable.

Another possibility: have everyone be able to submit their views and have an editor compile them into a single coherent article which has a gzipped file attached contain all the source emails and debate. These changes would make Wikipedia an unsurpased research tool.

Wikipedia is trying to use the superior ability of newer technology to replicate an editorial process and structural style like paper encyclopedias. By including all the discussion and all the opposing view points you no longer have to worry about elitism or attitutes etc. These are things that regular encyclopedias cannot do, so why limit the wikipedia in these ways. Perhaps the limitation of the structure of the information is part of some cry for "old school" legitimacy.

This would eliminate the "problems" that cause debate about Wikipedia. The one true problem is that Wikipedia seems to be striving to be branded by society with some arbitrary mark of "legitimacy". Striving for this mark in no way makes Wikipedia more useful and prevents it from quelling some of the debates that hinder its advance.

With certain caveats, wikipedia is useful, as is every other reference source, although the caveats are a little different. Wikipedia should advertize itself as a virtual crowd around a water cooler where you can ask a question and get one or more detailed answers, which you take with a grain of salt.

First of all a lot of the specific points strike me as valid and important. But the overall validity depends on the context in which we examine the project.

To me certain domains have been a great success. For many details of computer technology, especially emerging technology wikopedia is often a first place to go. The articles are often good and they merge in well with more extensive sources (<- the existence of these other sources is important!)

This provides a faster easier to use resource than google, much less clutter.

As Wikopedia is to philosophy in comparison idealized standard encyclopedias, these are to xml or firewalls in comparison to Wikopedia.

So at least within a limited set of domains Wikopedia has proven to be a SUCCESS.

The method *can* work.  And the result is a valuable if somewhat specialized encyclopedia.  Incidently it probably cost much less to produce than any other method and is updated and corrected more rapidly.

In other areas a lot of the entries are adequete, in still others as you say they of an "interesting" nature.

Now if Wikopedia were to claim to be *the* referance we would have a serious problem. But a huge number of referances are already availible,

And now even the academic world is slowly unlocking though they remain reluctant to share their resources, to redesign the mechanisms used to present research.

Quite frankly we've had the capacity to archive all papers for over a decade. A serious lobbying effort could have shifted the huge federal funds that currently indirectly support journals to a new system...

... a system that started out imitating existing publications and peer reviews; without the huge cost of paper publication and the huge cost of storage and organization; then evolved to more sophisticated forms of organization and linkage including journals created days after a new problem area was defined.

One strength of this would be that not only would Stanford have a more complete set of publications than it now has, Foothill community college down the road would have the same and so would a researcher in Kenya.

We have not seen the research community rally behind this. Indeed it is stil regarded as a threat in many circles.  In them energy is devoted to explaining why it can't work, not making it work.

So no matter how good the resource it would be criticized because it is a threat; just as some journalists reduce blogging to a set of rightwing fanatics, a part is used to represent the whole.

But we shall agree that in some, perhaps many areas Wikopedia not only fails to meet academic standards (not really a goal,) but even minimal standards of popular referance veracity.

So if he has a teacher who is somewhat intelligent some 6th grader is going to lose some points because some modern troller inserts the "history of the bathtub" by that classical American troller Mencken. We might also get history inspired by Franklin and Twain.

This may sound brutal, but checking sources is a good lesson. On the net we can double or triple check in the same time in takes to walk to a bookshelf and look up an entry.  

Wikopedia is one source among many. For many things it's a good starting point or adequete referance.

I personally would not commit much to it because I want editorial control. But it's easy enough for me to insert a link perhaps with a brief explanation at an appropiate place in an article.

It is easy for serious academics to build good referances for their domain.  They can use the same engine. They can also evolve engines that represent knowledge better. Certainly a philosophy encyclopedia would benefit from the "argumentation" systems that were such a rage in AI and hypertext in the early nineties.

Wikopedia is a valuable resource as it exists. And it is a fascinating experiment. It evolves, one is curious to see what shapes this organization takes. People who dislike it can certainly involve themselves in the definition and the reworking. And examining it frozen at certain places, watching articles change, the intense social flows...

It is also an "ontology" (newest AI buzzword, essentially meaning hierarchy only really cool if done in xml though you're really cool if you say lisp s-expressons are better...) Wikopedia is this model and set of links (heterarchial not hierarchial so maybe not an ontology) of all these words and ideas and things someone somewhere thought was important.

It's a model of the world in many respects more extensive and powerful than that of traditional encyclopedias.

I suspect not many of them lists Japan's "cell phone culture" which incidently as it's evolving in Asia may have an effect exceeding that of the PC or net.

Wikopedia (like SMS) a "swarm" tool, a first experiment. It may indeed be heading for a deadend, but it remains a revolutionary step and (I don't mean to sound elitist here, but...) much of academia won't recognize it's historic importance until a few years from now people do their thesis on the subject.

As for it's flaws work with it, become part of the history or build your reliable little domains and link them to all the knowledge bases (including Wikis) which can be extended by them.

For most of us Wikopedia is not a center, it is an event which may or may not successfully evolve into the new shapes of hypertext. As a general rule many of the really valuable works will be snatched up and evolve.

I read an idea that is really cool:

In the future every little kid when they start school will start their own encyclopedia and they will keep adding to it all their lives...

...and their great grandkids will someday look at a drawing of a rainbow and what a six year old said about it...

...and no it won't pass peer review (except maybe among the committee of grandmas) but quite possibly the addition written 15 years later will or the link...

That first colored rainbow is what wikopedia is and in large part the medium is the message, the spontaneous creation, organization, reorganization...

A lot of it may be about discovering what can go wrong, but that is a key part of a truly scientific approach. Other things will emerge.

• There is proposed Wikipedia.
• There already is a Wikipedia.

• If the extant Wikipedia is like www.google.com
• The proposed Wikipedia is like scholar.google.com

The www.* is much bigger and popular than scholar.*
Even if you love spending most of your time in "scholar," it is wrong to expect that most of the other people also do the same.

What constitutes an expert is very difficult to define, and certifying someone as an expert in something impossible.

So what? So don't look at it from the perspective of a specialist. The wikipedia philosophy entry is more than adequate, in my opinion, for an online encyclopedia. Not terribly good for a college-level course, no. But it does seem to be every bit as thorough - or at least approachingly so - as many of the big-name encyclopedias (britannica, world book, etc.) that are available in public high schools and libraries.

Specialists have specialized encyclopedias for a reason - it's not practical or realistic to expect an encyclopedia that covers many different topics to delve into the more complex workings of the topic. It'd be impossible to fit the damn things on shelves; as it is, most encyclopedias have a difficult time fitting on a single shelf row.

Additionally, specialists also have trade journals, publication archives, and various other things of that ilk.

I will agree that wikipedia's credibility is an issue with the 'education' croud - high schools, colleges, and their ilk. In my mind, the problem lies predominantly in the mind of the educators, as American educators (the people that would predominantly get a use out of such a resource, being as it is in English, etc.) tend to be fairly poorly educated (education having nothing to do with schooling, of course). I think you're not giving wikipedia a fair chance in the least.

Additionally, it would seem you've got vested interests in a fork. You were one of the co-founders, and have since left the project: why did you leave? Or were you ousted? Wouldn't it be beneficial to your inflated ego (and even your viability as an academian) if there was such a community, founded or conceived by you in existence, instead of one that was once under your control - yet no longer?

beyond the discussion of preference as to how data will be collected and analyzed, the most significant part missing here is the fact that the wikipedia engine is available to use and modify by any body who wishes to do so.

The simplest solution for the academic body
is to create a moderated wikiengine based site (call it acapedia if you so wish) in which the academic discourse of specialized peers takes place, no trolls accept for academic trolls.
Than the discussion here will be of true value.

the public would greatly benefit from such a site in which an active academic discussion takes place. the visibility of such discussion would be very interesting.

i wonder if the academic ivory towers are actually interested in making such an effort, i have worked in academia for several years on web presence, apart from some minor (if very noble) examples, academia does not make information and discourse easily available. in fact it seems the notion that the information should be kept only for available to specialists is the norm.

the article was well written. but in a sense it seems to be a dull point of view (apologies to larry sanger, who i respect for his work)
the couldhavebeen shouldhavebeen idea is irrelevant now, the technology is availiable to modify and use by anybody. it is left for academia  to decide if the will make a serious effort to make quality information avaliable to the public for free, or will they continue the tradition of some byzantine court, smirking with diapproval at the revolting peasant outside.

No encyclopedia is reliable, Wikipedia included. And no encyclopedia should be used for anything but a starting point.

I use it for mainly two things: Refreshing my memory about forgotten issues, and finding a starting point. I'll give two examples.

Some time ago we decided we'd like to make coffee. So we promptly bought a pressure type coffee percolator, some ground coffee and tried to brew something from it. It was crap.

So, I went to Wikipedia, read the page on coffee, googled around a bit based on the info found, and ended getting toasted beans and a coffee grinder. The info I found also helped me understand everything should be as clean as possible, and that my percolator needed to build some pressure to work properly. So I tried again, and got decent coffee out of it. I also intend to try with a french press, based again on some info I got from Wikipedia.

The second example is that I pretty much forgot the little I knew about trigonometry and went to the Wikipedia page to refresh my memory.

The articles might not have been written by some specialist in coffee, or an eminent mathematician. I don't expect Wikipedia to contain all there is to know about coffee or math, or even to contain 100% correct information. However, Wikipedia is just fine for finding some starting points, or to refresh my memory about concepts I already knew.

Incidentally, the paper encyclopedia I have on my shelf is expensive and composed of 15 pretty big books. Despite that, it's crap as a starting point for understanding how to brew coffee. It explains what it is, but contains no pointers. Not even references to methods of brewing it. I can certainly find the entry for "percolator", but no references to it under "coffee" for some reason. Some nice people decided to add their little bit of knowledge by writing a bit on their favourite drink. Meanwhile, the encyclopedia on my shelf will continue sitting there, being as useless as before.

When we suggest that the value of Wikipedia is in its presentation of multiple perspectives - truths - we have not strayed far from the much-maligned Truth. When we suggest that Wikipedia ought to be valued by certain communities because of its multitude of perspectives, what we find is no less a meta-narrative. And while it may be this embodiment of an agenda of allowing all voices to speak appeals to a certain liberal aesthetic, the aesthetic preferences of kuro5hin contributers seem decidedly unintersting in the context of this article.

Perhaps more interesting is the author's implicit perscription of those communities of value with which the values of the Wikipedia community ought to accord.

It seems redundant to debate whether academia will accept Wikipedia as an authority, or even as a legitimate participtant in scholarly discourse. Wikipedia is not peer reviewed, and is not otherwise written by authors recognized as legitimate participants in scholarly discourse. No more so does one cite or seriously interact with the opinion of an undergraduate amateur in one's Thesis; it simply isn't done.

If Wikipedia is to be recognized as a legitimate participant in scholarly discourse in academia, then by all means we must establish something approximating a panel of experts - masters to us peers - to lend legitimacy - respectability - to our blind grasping.

But that the Wikipedia community ought to undertake to obtain this legitimacy is not so clear. Consider that I am not a student of history. While I have an interest in historical topics in so far as they interesect my fields of interest, I am by no means a student of history.

A student of history participates in a very specific community of value, a community in which I do not participate. In that community, it may be essential to know the date and hour at which Walter Cummings was born; I do not dispute the legitimacy of this value in this community. But I nonetheless recognize that in the communities of value in which I participate, the date and hour at which Walter Cummings was born has at best trivial value. It so happens that we do value knowing who Walter Cummings was and specifically the contents of his psychological expositions, but the exact date and hour at which he was born is inconsequential in our community.

I welcome participation in discourse about Walter Cummings with students of history. In the finest liberal aesthetic sense, our multitude of perspectives may together offer insight to participants from both communities.

But what I do not welcome is for the community of value of students of history to dicatate to our community of students of psychology, the process, procedures, and content of our collaboration if these stipulations consort to inexoribly disrupt our own values.

We will not collaborate as a community so far as in that collaboration we cease to be a community, becoming instead an oligarchy of value-masters and value-slaves. If the terms of your participation in our community are that you become the moderators and masters of the community, we reject your participation, for that is no community at all.

It never occurred to me before, but after reading this article (particularly em's comment, et seq.) I now realize that surely at least a good fraction of one percent of the stuff of Wikipedia have to be pure creations - no more materially true, and no less lovely and meaningful, than the contents of the fabled Encyclopedia of Tlön.

Think about it! Those passages could easily be the most valuable part of all the Wikipedia.

The problem for us readers, now, is to find them.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@ij.net

#2 Who is foolish enough to trust anything posted on the Internet? I mean really. The Internet is not the real world, and Wiki web sites can be scribbled over by people posting to their own inner voices. This is not a problem with Wikipedia, but a problem with Wiki, in that it needs credible editors to filter out those inner voices or at least translate them into something more credible and understandable if it is indeed factual.

#3 Just about anything can have a Wikipedia entry. At what point does Wikipedia reject entries? The GNAA and Maddox both have entries, but the real Encyclopedia does not. Perhaps Wikipedia should have a "Popculture" or "Cyberculture" section for entries such as these which people can filter out in their searches? Having these Popculture or Cyberculture topics just adds more fuel to the fire of people trying to burn down Wikipedia's credibility.

#4 Too bad libraries, colleges, and other institutions do not volunteer to help out with Wikipedia to edit entries and keep things credible.

#5 Hot topics, like Intelligent Design and certain Religions, get scribbled over by the bashers of those topics. For example, ID is called a Pseduoscience by people opposed to it, and a Science by people who are for it. So what will the official final and edited version say?

#6 People won't want to donate to a project where their contributions get edited out, objected to, and they are told they are wrong. Many just leave and then badmouth Wikipedia on other web sites. So what is the real market to which Wikipedia is trying to reach? The readers or the writers or the editors, perhaps all three? Has any sort of marketing been done on Wikipedia at all, or is it going to end up like the Dotcoms and go bust? Trying to market to everyone is a certain business failure. So Wikipedia needs to learn what type of people need their services and market towards them. Obviously librarians, technophobes, etc and those who say Wikipedia lacks credibility will never be marketed towards. So perhaps the market would be to those who are knowledgeable, know how to use a computer and the Internet, perhaps has a college education or 10 years of work experience, have a bit of a writing background or writing skills, knows how to be objective and can use a neutral point of view, you know, the Al Gore type. ;)

#7 Offline searching should be an option, is there going to be a finalized version that can be burned to ISOs to make CDs or DVDs and then software for most platforms to search those CDs/DVDs for information? Perhaps sales could be for pre-burned CDs and DVDs like many Open Sourced companies seem to offer as an alternative to downloading the files.

#8 Perhaps have a critic's corner to move those comments written by Trolls, Bashers, etc and have it on a seperate link to the topic so people can see what the member feedback says, and a disclaimer that it may not actually be factual. That way there is no "censorship" but people are allowed to keep their comments in a sort of "sandbox". As a matter of fact, why not allow members to write in a "sandbox" this way and then have editors pick the best comments to be included in the topic if they are found to be factual, objective, netural point of view, etc.

#9 Spin off two versions of Wikipedia, the credible one where all facts have been checked, etc, and an unchecked one in which members can scribble over it. Give the user the option of searching either one, and they have the option to search the credible version or the unchecked version or both.

There's another kind of scenario I've seen, which is related to the "trolls" theme in the article, but not quite.  Wikipedia has an unrecognized problem with cranks on obscure topics.  Much ink is spilled by Wikipedians about how when somebody goes into some popular article and edits it into something very tendentious, it is caught quickly and reverted.  What is not much discussed at all is cases where cranks go into an article that's not popular at all and alter it, to suit their ideology and/or political agenda.

I have an example in mind.  It is the Wikipedia article on the Taíno, the first Native American peoples that the Spaniards had extensive contact with in the New World.  The Taíno were decimated by disease and cultural assimilation in the 16th century, and thus have been extinct for over 400 years.

There is, however, a group of Puerto Ricans, based in New Jersey, who call themselves the "The Jatibonicù Taino Tribal Band of New Jersey", claim to be Taínos, and seek to achieve tribal nation status with the US government.  These people obviously have a large interest in propagating a false version of New World colonial history, and they have edited the Wikipedia article to hedge the claims of Taíno extinction with things like "it is popular scholarly opinion", and insert their blatantly fabricated story into the article.

The Taínos are a pretty obscure topic.  The only countries where the general population cares to know much about them are Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.  In most of these it's a topic that's taught very early on in elementary school, and which captivates people's imagination, and thus is subject to constant representation in the popular culture.  The result is that most people know all they want to know about the topic, and never feel like they have a need to look it up in an encyclopedia.  But the crucial point now is that the balance of power in the Wikipedia article favors the fake "Taínos".  They have much more of an interest in presenting a false version of history in the Wikipedia article, than other people do in eliminating outright fabrications from it.  The people who could correct it just don't have enough at stake to dedicate the amount of time required.

For a bit more of information, see the discussion pages for Taino (without the accent on the "i") and Taíno (with the accent).

I found this article a very turgid read - if I hadn't known who Larry Sanger was and thought it might be worth learning his opinion on Wikipedia I wouldn't have bothered reading through his pompous Comic Book Guy sytle prose. Indeed, through his writing style and his presented argument against Wikipedia Sanger comes across as someone who is desperately seeking credibility in the academic world and is trying to shake off his perceived problems of association with the Wikipedia project. Beyond drawing that conclusion I found very little perceptive criticism in the article.

The problem is that Sanger, despite protesting that he realises how cool the project is, still doesn't get it. Wikipedia should be celebrated for what it is, not for it's perceived short-comings in comparison to the authoritativeness of conventional encyclopedias.

For me, wikipedia is a text version of the conversations that you take part in in ordinary life. A lot of anyone's knowledge is gained through what they learn from talking to other people. Not in authoritative university lectures or tutorials but at picnics, at dinner parties, in bed, at work etc. These conversations are largely non-authorial, just people relating interesting facts they have heard, or "telling it like it is". In these conversations, people engage with a discourse in many ways. Somtimes they enthusiastically agree with what is being said and applaud it and add to it. Or they have some slight disagreements which they throw into the conversation. Or perhaps they disagree more strongly and turn the conversation into an argument. Much the same thing takes place on Wikipedia.

The material in Wikipedia may not be the truth but it is certainly a collective perception of the truth which in itself is a valuable resource. Because Wikipedia does not pretend to the utopian Enlightenment ideal of an authorative telling of the truth it often better portrays a richer tapesty of truths.

Sanger reminds me of fundamental christians who want to maintain that the Bible is the product of one single authoratitive voice, that being the voice of the ultimate knower of reality, God. Instead we know that the Bible, like many religious bodies of learning, is the distilled voice of many contributor's perceptions of truth.

I'm writing this off the cuff and feel like I'm probably starting to sound too grandiloquent myself, so I'll stop here. I guess my final word is that despite modelling itself on an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is something radically different and should be appreciated on its own grounds.

Vandals are easy. Someone adds profanity to an article, he is reverted within an hour. Someone repeats this, the IP is banned. There is little reward in trying to work around the ban, since there is very little satisfaction (Wikipedians don't react emotionally to this, their comments usually amount to "rv vandalism").

One much more serious problem is a group of users, who do not value logic and pluralism of opinions, but only care about their extremist position. Quite often their position may appear to be "traditional", i.e. they are against NPOV (neutral point of view) of a particular article. For example, a user found the "Zoophilia" article and set on a quest to expose the dangers of animal abuse there. Another user came to "Paedophilia" and decided to make a point that any sex with a child automatically scars them for life and children are not capable of consent. Or a user finds "Soviet Union" article and feels an urge to explain to everyone that it was a totalitarian nightmare.

The problem with such users is not that the point they make is totally devoid of merit, it's that they appear to be completely incapable of understanding the idea of neutrality, of presenting conflicting viewpoints in the same article in a factual manner without endorsing any of them.

These users are immune to persuasion. Any attempt at rational discourse is futile, as anyone of you who argued with a moron is aware of. It's said "Don't mud-wrestle with a pig. You'll both get dirty and the pig loves it". That's the problem. When such a pig "attacks" a Wikipedia article, other users feel obliged to respond in a polite and rational way (according to the policies), even though many of them must realise that they are mud-wrestling with a pig. We can show facts, give references, build cohesive logical arguments, but in the end we can't make that troll change his opinion one iota.

Wikipedia is more like "the People's Encyclopedia" where all views are tolerated as "diversity" and it is something that can belong to everyone. So, when you write an article about the Earth being flat or how humans decended from a dying race from another galaxy, you can be sure that you "own" that little part of the greater whole. You don't need to be an "expert", acknowledged in any particular field as having some knowledge about it. People can then help you with your article to make it more readable. But the entire point is that the content of articles do not necessarily have a one-to-one correspondence to any particular version of reality.

Contrast this with Encyclopedia Britannica. They are unlikely to have an article that is very far outside the "mainstream" of academic thinking. WHen they had their "web experiment" which I believe persists somewhat to this day, they would have far more "current" content than the printed version. So I do not believe there is a correlation between "currency" and "academic mainstream". Nor would I necessarily exclude controversial opinions as they exist in this "academic mainstream" as well as they exist outside of it.

An appeal for "expertise" in Wikipedia is pointless - it is designed to be something composed by non-experts, contributed to by "the community at large" and not reviewed in any formal manner. To try to introduce experts and reviews into this process simply dooms it from the beginning.

However, as long as it is "The People's Encyclopedia", it is not as credible an academic resource as a reviewed collection of articles.

I think it would be hard to reconcile the positive value of wikipedia's community created nature with something like central academic board. However, I think it would possible to create decentralized boards. I'm not a contributor, so I don't have a lot of credibility, but it seems to my outsider's eyes is that it should be possible to allow any number of self appointed, self governing entities to act as authorities.

The function of an authority would be to bless versions of articles. When viewing an article, you could see whether any authority has reviewed an article and blessed it, and which prior versions had been blessed by an authority. Take historical articles. If the Republican National Committee or the Socialist Workers Party wanted to create authorities to bless versions of articles that support their of history; fine. If the Wikipedia organizers wanted to invite a bunch of illustrious academics to form an authority for the purposes of blessing historical articles, great. If I and a buch of my friends are history buffs and are getting annoyed by trolls modding our work, we could form an authority to bless our own work.

When searching for an article, I could limit my results to versions approved by set of trusted authorities. If I'm looking at an article, I could see who had blessed it and whether there were prior versions that were blessed by different authorities.

Wikipedia is just fine, and the more the "experts" squawk and complain, the greater the evidence that it is so. This is the Age of Participation, and self-correction will ultimately win out, because experience, not expertise, is the new authority. Only Modernists fear being shouted down, because they fear power and try to control it through logic and reason (and laws and rules). Pomos have no such fear, for they see the artificiality of Modernist power structures and rightly say, "Bullshit."

Over the heads of the lexicographers, this word was inserted. A big advertising campaign (well, by reference publishing standards) was initiated.

As a sign of karmic retribution, the printing works caught fire before the books were shipped. Unfortunately, the fire didn't harm the store which held the new dictionaries. The dictionaries went out, sold in droves (despite being only one headword different in about 100,000), and the lexicographers and editors grumbled into their teacups.

Sadly, many experts are still capable of holding their own biases in their fields of knowledge, and would use any policy that would defer to them as the final authority to inject their personal biases into the work.  

While Wikipedia's stance on presenting every side of an issue can help alleviate that, certainly crackpot experts could provide just as much of a problem as the one you (rightly) describe.  

He accuses me of something that most people would surely find shocking, and he offers -- of course -- absolutely no evidence for it.  I am not anti-experise in any fashion, and neither I nor the community at large hold the views that he ascribes to us.

We are in the process of building a review process which he would be welcome to comment on -- if he cared to do so.  Instead, he makes up complete falsehoods about us and posts them here.  As I say in the title -- his criticisms would be interesting -- if they were in any way true.

I'm very disappointed in you Larry.  In the past, I thought you were someone who was committed to getting it right, doing your homework, and engaging in rational dialogue for mutual understanding.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) needs your support. Over 950 professional philosophers are donating their time and labor to collaboratively write, referee, and maintain our reference work. To cover the annual costs of administering and supporting this volunteer effort, Stanford University has partnered with the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) for the purpose of building an endowment for the SEP. While the library organizations attempt to raise $3 million for the SEP over the course of 3 years (primarily from libraries at academic institutions offering degrees in philosophy), we here at Stanford hope to raise $1.125 million from private individuals and corporations during that same time period.

there's two things where wikipedia truly shines ... they cover recent and computer related subjects that aren't going to be in a print encyclopedia ... and they offer online links where people can get more information ... they also list reference works, which i think should be expanded for each entry

 Pick

 1)10 most popular articles.
 2)10 randomly selected moderate-to-high traffic articles.
 3)10 randomly selected low traffic articles.

 Compare against 'reputable' encyclopedias. Then compare all references against primary sources.

 Judge on accuracy, comprehensiveness, lucidity, and presentation.

 Present results.

 Repeat every couple of months.

Hell, I take issue with the idea that there even is a governing structure. Pretty much everything is done by consensus. Almost all of the structure has been put in place by whoever got there first, a sort of House that Everyone Built At Once. It certainly ain't the House that Larry Built.

Either go back and contribute, or stop talking smack about a project you're no longer involved with.

a good encyclopedia entry in any subject demands a level of brevity and directness that is actually more important than anything a superspecialist in a given subject matter can bring to the dinner table

additionally, anyone who goes to an encyclopedia is usually looking for something between a dictionary and a textbook: a rough overview of a subject

therefore, your average college kid could cover the majority of such needs rather effectively, and can fact-check the majority of such needs rather effectively, as they aren't scaling the peaks of the subject matter, they are just describing to us the landscape

why try to redefine the purpose of an encyclopedia with wikipedia then?

so it would seem the lack of academia input is not really a problem for wikipedia in the end

and if the subject is really esoteric? or contentious?

well there you go again: you are asking wikipedia to serve something that is not it's function

i am certain that if i were investigating the higgs boson, there is plenty that i cannot find on wikipedia

but if i was actually interested in some of those esoteric things about a higgs boson, you have to admit that my knowledge would be beyond the encyclopedic sampling-the-subject-matter level of interest, and therefore i wouldn't even being using wikipedia in the first place... again, don't ask wikipedia to be something it's not

same with contentious issues

take the subject of abortion

does anyone actually believe you are going to find an impartial treatment on the subject matter of abortion ANYWHERE, nevermind an online democratic encyclopedia? would wikipedia's handling of the subject of abortion be worse than say, the encyclopedia britannica?

by asking wikipedia to be impartial and authoritative on a contentious subject matter, you are asking wikipedia to do something no book or human can actually do, so why the impossibly standards?

I agree with most of your assertions. One other issue about Academicians is that they will not receive any recognition for contributing to wikipedia. This is mostly because their stodgy peers will pay no attention to this kind of work. This means that contributing to wikipedia is essentially charity work for them, and they can't afford to spend inordinate amounts of time on it. So, if someone insists on posting nonsense, there is just not worth it to argue with people who seem to have almost unlimited amounts of time.

The simple fact of the matter is that credentials are no guarantee of competence. A huge percentage of academia is filled with professional bullshitters, and they seem to be pissed off that Wikipedia is doing an end-run around their nonsense.

and that's a good thing

wikipedia is democratic in its derivation way before it is elitist in any aspect, and that democratic heart of the project is its source of greatest power and promise

in fact, any problem wikipedia has can probably be traced to some sort of residual elitism somewhere: amongst a contributor, or what a questionable rule promotes in contributor behavior

and i would assert that those who doubt the very ability of wikipedia to survive and prove very useful, in fact, useful in a way that has much to do with the promise of the internet itself, are elitists themselves

there is never a silver bullet, there is only a set of rules which minimizes elitism and mischief, no set of rules will remove it completely, as we are talking about human beings being the engine here, you can't remove the human being from the equation

but that doesn't mean a good set of rules shouldn't be fine tuned until it reaches a sweet spot that minimizes mischief and elitism the most effectively

i think the biggest detractors of wikipedia are in the end only the usual sort of negative types who confuse themselves just being overly critical as somehow being useful or wise

I once considered submitting some articles to Wikipedia on the topics I am an expert on (graduate degrees in physics and electrical engineering with research experience in both field) but after I looked through the site I realized I didn't have the time or patience to deal with the fools that inhabit the project. Most of the technical articles read as if they were written by a pretentious undergraduate that just finished freshmen physics or some high school kid with too much time on his hand and too little education.

As for statements of opinion, shall we reject "The New Encyclopedia Britannica" because it says, "Korean artists were generally inferior to the Chinese and Japanese in technical perfection and precision"? I won't even bother to list the host of other errors in that edition on a single topic: Korea.

Anyway, the point is that until one demonstrates that good information is regularly being destroyed by bad information, one has not built a case for the need for change.

The radical nature of the openness and acceptance there has led to total chaos in several spots. One needs look no further than the talk section of the GNAA article for an exemplar of this attitude. People like the GNAA and I sit back and laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all as "serious" Wikipedians argue on both sides of the matter about something which is clearly a turd and doesn't belong in any serious academic work. The arguments drag on and on not only because the GNAA helps it along but because people on Wikipedia are so blindly committed to "NPoV", objectivity and other related ideology that they fail to recognize truly worthless content for what it is.

Similarly, I read Slashdot a lot and notice an awful lot of the kookier users who come out of the woodwork there using Wikipedia as a resource to back up their ludicrous arguments or theories or whathaveyou. I can only surmise that these same people (or other people of the same mind) also contribute to Wikipedia. The truism that 50% of all people are of below-average intelligence rings true on Wikipedia, and the brighter minds who are experts in particular fields don't have the time to waste on constantly revising their articles every time some crackpot takes a crap on them.

While some may look at the real trolling that goes on there, the type perpetuated by the GNAA, as the destructive force attacking Wikipedia, it is only a symptom. People like that come in and mock the system because the system is so ludicrously broken in the first place.

Let me preface this by saying that I know Wikipedia is very cool. A lot of people do not think so, but of course they are wrong.