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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Another grain of salt for Wikipedia

Larry Sanger, a recently-departed co-founder of Wikipedia, has written a lengthy diatribe about the problems with the open-source participatory encylopedia. The primary issue, he says, is anti-elitism:

As a community, Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, far from being elitist (which would, in this context, mean excluding the unwashed masses), it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated).

The consequence, according to Sanger, is experts staying away from Wikipedia because they don’t want to have to defend what they’ve written against attacks by nonexperts. This explains recurring questions about Wikipedia’s credibility, Sanger says, along with the dominance of “difficult people, trolls, and their enablers.”

Sanger says he supported an academic review board of some kind.

But because project participants have such a horror of the traditional deference to expertise, this sort of proposal has never been taken very seriously by most Wikipedians leading the project now. And so much the worse for Wikipedia and its reputation.

 

01/02/05 | 0 Comments | Another grain of salt for Wikipedia

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