infobong.com

Larry Sanger has an interesting post on Kuro5hin.org about how some cultural and architectual issues keep Wikipedia from attracting subject-area experts. He contends that Wikipedia's radical openness impedes efforts to eliminate trolls and often leads to watered-down articles, particularly on controversial subjects.

Although I find Wikipedia to be much better than I would have ever imagined, I can certainly see some of the phenomena he describes reflected in Wikipedia content. He describes how a solid article by an expert can be appended or cut by less-informed contributors, leaving an uninformative mess. I'll use the Wikipedia entry on "Communication Studies," which says "Marshall McLuhan was one of the early pioneers [of the field]." Um, hardly. McLuhan was working twenty years after universities began to establish communications programs and the article fails to acknowledge McLuhan's teacher Harold Innis, who's vastly more influential than Wired magazine's patron saint. Although McLuhan might be a joke among the communications scholars I come in contact with as a doctoral student in communications, his technological determinist viewpoint jibes with techies, so he gets credited in a technocentric encyclopedia.

Sanger's point about Wikipedia's lack of respect for expertise echoes my criticism of IndyMedia, where openness marginalizes participants with greater levels of experience or professional knowledege. Sanger doesn't provide any clear solutions for this issue, but I agree that participatory projects that want to gain a level of general credibility will need to find ways to resolve this tension.