This is from InfoWorld (www.infoworld.com):

October 21, 2005
Wikipedia: Maybe the masses aren't asses, after all

So, the news this week was that Wikipedia's founder admitted it has "serious quality problems." In part a response to Nick Carr's scathing rebuke of the rise of the amateur class, also picked up by InfoWorld.

Wikipedia being what it is, it actually has an encyclopedia entry called "Criticism of Wikipedia". There's something about that candor that you just have to love.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I wonder how valid all of this criticism is. I'm no deconstructionist (spent all my grad school years fighting against such limp-minded buffoonery), but despite my initial going with the flow ("It stinks! I've smelled it!!") I'm wondering if the criticism is misplaced.

After all, just who, precisely, constitutes an expert in people, places, and things?

What makes a good encyclopedia? If I'm reading it today, I suppose I want a maximum of distilled, comprehensive facts on a given subject. [That said, I think I'd be equally interested in the subjective journal entries from those who were fought in the Battle of the Bulge as I would be about the date, location, etc. Actually, I'd be much more interested in the journal entry. Because that's where my humanity connects with theirs.] But if I'm reading it tomorrow (meaning, if I were an anthropologist stumbling across an encyclopedia from 100-1000 years ago), I think I'd prefer to read a collective bubbling up of a community.

In other words, I'd want to read what a community thought about itself.

This is, really, what "normal" encyclopedias do, but they make pretensions of being something more. They pretend, that is, to be authoritative. I guess I'm not really sure what that means anymore. Does it mean the cathedral or the bazaar? Which information really matters most? What the titled experts think, or what the collective experts think?

I think both - cathedral and bazaar - have their place in encyclopedias. But if I had to choose one, I think it would be the bazaar. Not because it's necessarily better information (though I do believe it will tend to be more comprehensive in scope, if the contribution community is wide enough), but because it's local information. This is a blessing, not a curse, of the rise of the commons.

I suspect that the real problem with Wikipedia is simply that it's still young enough that it lacks a suitably disparate and large community behind it. Assuming it provides even a modicum of value today (it does), then people will build on that modicum until it becomes ever more useful as it collects our communal knowledge. The masses may be asses (thus spake Alexander Hamilton), but it's better than the tyranny of the few over time.

Posted by Matt Asay on October 21, 2005 08:43 AM
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2005/10/wikipedia_mayb...