The debate about Wikipedia will no doubt continue for a long time. This post is written as a small contribution to it (and assumes some familiarity with the recent round of discussions).
Jimmy Wales is quoted in Wired News as saying, "We're after ... a standard that is suitable for the general reader … it should lead me to where I'm ready to learn more".
Wired News suggests that Wales may have been referring to more than Wikipedia in making these remarks: the indication is that he was arguing that no encyclopedia is a 'top-tier reference source'.
However these terms ('top-tier reference source', 'encyclopedia') are defined, the truthfulness of a reference work, its reliability, must not be lost sight of in the discussion surrounding Wikipedia. We value first rate reference books for their attempt to approach the truth, however arduous the attempt and elusive the quarry. As contemporary users (and not as historians studying "encyclopedias"), we value them as they are perceptive, summary reports, consolidating upon both what is established as known and what might (or might not) be glimpsed at the frontiers of knowledge. To perform these tasks well demands remarkable skills, knowledge and personal qualities.
In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1956), Auden spoke of the 'unselfish courage' of scholars who 'read the unreadable' and so 'retrieve the rare prize'. Often the target of jest (Rabelais!), scholars perform indispensable, painstaking work, building up the knowledge and apparatus by which we can come closer to the truth about a subject. In a scholarly resource, writes Danah Boyd (her particular example is taken from the Emile Durkheim Archive), we have 'citations as well as interpretation of both primary and secondary texts … We know the status of the author (here, a student in sociology), why he wrote this entry and who has checked his entry for verification. Yes, he could be lying, but this is much more reassuring than an entry written by N unknown people'. She adds, 'I also believe that there is something to be said about expertise. The eccentric PhDs with their narrow focus have spent years dedicated to understanding very particular areas of knowledge. They are invested in the accuracy of a particular topic, understand the different debates and are deeply aware of the consequences of poor interpretation. They research things actively, trying to express all sides. It is not simply their authority that makes their descriptions have weight - it is also what they have to lose'. They are under discipline and it is (or should be) exacting: Samuel Johnson defined a scholar as 'one who learns of a master'.
Todd Wilkens (More Smarter) says (in two postings):
Authority of information and knowledge is about quality not quantity.
… too much power in the hands of an elite can be extremely dangerous. However, the majority of us believe that knowledge is not merely a matter (of) rhetorical consensus. Some people really do have expertise and we should take advantage of it. Perhaps the wiki model as it stands now is not the right way to address this.
Ross referred at Many2Many to a paper by Andrew Lih, Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? (pdf), in which Lih concludes:
Open content projects such as Wikipedia received their inspiration from the earlier open source software community that emerged from online collaboration for developing software. Linus Torvalds, leader of the Linux open source movement once said,“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” He was referring to software development, but it is equally relevant to Wikipedia. This use of more “eyeballs” is a rather unique feature of participatory journalism, as it benefits directly from more traffic and more users making their impression by scrutinizing or contributing to content. This tight feedback loop between reading and editing provides for very quick evolution of encyclopedic knowledge, providing a function that has been missing in the traditional media ecology.
Lih's research, as I understand it, is based explicitly on two assumptions that give him his "metrics" for measuring an article's reputation within Wikipedia:
The assumption is that more editing cycles on an article provides for a deeper treatment of the subject or more scrutiny of the content. …
With more editors, there are more voices and different points of view for a given subject
The number of times an article in Wikipedia has been edited, or the number of editors it has had, indeed tell us about the level of attention it has attracted. But this, the very "open source-ness" of Wikipedia, is absolutely not a guarantee of its scholarliness or its truthfulness.
A better model for collaborative investigation into truth might be drawn from the teamwork commonly involved in science. In my experience of this, groups within a research laboratory make presentations on their work in progress, other members of the team and guests discuss and criticise this, the work is re-considered, etc. Papers that are then submitted for publication are subjected to peer review and, once published, stand or fall by their tested veracity.
'peer production of shared knowledge' (Clay Shirky) without these checks and challenges is not desirable in a work of reference. Some accommodation of the wiki model is required.
