I love Wikipedia. When US Vice President Dick Cheney proclaimed the Bush administration had an agenda based on the record number of votes the president had attracted, it was the Wikipedia that let me explore the number of votes cast for every US president. Thus I was able to determine that challenger John Kerry had also exceeded the highest number of votes ever cast for a US president.

I have been unimpressed by the arguments against Wikipedia…until now. Writing at Tech Central Station, former Encyclopedia Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry takes on the Wikipedia concept. In response to the notion that substantil peer editing—what McHeny calls “a quasi Darwinian process”—will produce accurate content, McHenry asks,

Does someone actually believe this? Evidently so. Why? It’s very hard to say. One possibility that occurs to me is this: The combination of prolificacy and inattention to accuracy that characterizes this process is highly suggestive of the modern pedagogic technique known as “journaling.”

To test the effectiveness of peer editing, McHeny selects the biography of Alexander Hamilton, whose date of birth is in dispute. McHenry finds several inconsistencies and inaccuracies.

The article is what might be expected of a high school student, and at that it would be a C paper at best. Yet this article has been “edited” over 150 times. Some of those edits consisted of vandalism, and others were cleanups afterward. But how many Wikipedian editors have read that article and not noticed what I saw on a cursory scan? How long does it take for an article to evolve into a “polished, presentable masterpiece,” or even just into a usable workaday encyclopedia article?

McHenry’s observations need to be added to the input about the idea of community editing and participatory journalism. There’s still something to be said for professionals who have been trained to produce accurate and authoritative content.