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February 20, 2009, 03:10 PM ET
What Does Wikipedia Mean for the Future of Expertise?
The rise of Wikipedia seems to have afflicted some scholars with a mild case of existential panic. And understandably so: When the world’s most popular reference tool is such an egalitarian outfit, that can be interpreted as a fairly stiff challenge to the value of expertise, right?
It most certainly can, writes Larry Sanger in a new article on “The Fate of Expertise After Wikipedia.” But fear not, scholars: Expertise, he says, will win out in the end.
Seasoned Wikipedia watchers are already familiar with the saga of Mr. Sanger: He was there with Jimmy Wales when the online encyclopedia was founded (and, in fact, when its predecessor, Nupedia, was conceived), but he left Wikipedia in 2002 because he felt the site’s credentials-be-damned approach benefited vandals and kept away scholars. In 2006 he unveiled Citizendium, a competing encyclopedia that entrusts editing power to approved experts. And he has emerged, over the past few years, as a reliable gadfly, always willing to make the case that Wikipedia’s perceived inhospitability to experts is holding the site back.
Writing for a special issue of the philosophy journal Episteme, Mr. Sanger — who has a Ph.D. in philosophy and a particular interest in epistemology — offers what he calls “a work of academic philosophy” weighing in on “Wikipedia’s epistemic potential.” Which means that Wikipedia’s contributors and critics will have to wade through some high-minded epistemological stuff before they get to the part that really riles them.
Still, there’s enough grist to fill a Slashdot thread in the article’s final section, where Mr. Sanger aims to demonstrate that Wikipedia is “nothing like the egalitarian utopia its most radical defenders might have us believe.” (Since he was around for Wikipedia’s heady early days, Mr. Sanger has certainly heard more paeans to the site’s egalitarian principles than most of its users have. But the anti-utopian argument still feels a bit like a battle against a straw man.)
Mr. Sanger raises one especially interesting point: While conventional wisdom seems to hold that most Wikipedia articles improve over time, he’s far from sold. In fact, he offers an alternate hypothesis: “The quality of a given Wikipedia article will do a random walk around the highest level of quality permitted by the most persistent and aggressive people who follow an article.” It’s a well-turned theory, but is it true?
This is the first installment in Wikipedia Watch, an occasional series chronicling news and views on the open-source encyclopedia. If you’ve got ideas for future posts on the topic, feel free to drop me a line at brock.read@chronicle.com. —Brock Read
Categories: Wikipedia-Watch
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