As most of you know I love Wikipedia, even sponsor it. But I found Nick Carr‘s observation as interesting as it is eloquent:
Whatever happens between Wikipedia and Citizendium, here’s what Wales and Sanger cannot be forgiven for: They have taken the encyclopedia out of the high school library, where it belongs, and turned it into some kind of totem of "human knowledge." Who the hell goes to an encyclopedia looking for "truth," anyway? You go to an encyclopedia when you can’t remember whether it was Cortez or Balboa who killed Montezuma or when you want to find out which countries border Turkey. What normal people want from an encyclopedia is not truth but accuracy. And figuring out whether something is accurate or not does not require thousands of words of epistemological hand-wringing. If it jibes with the facts, it’s accurate. If it doesn’t, it ain’t. One of the reasons Wikipedia so often gets a free pass is that it pretends it’s in the truth business rather than the accuracy business. That’s bullshit, but people seem to buy it.
This was eye catching too:
In fact, by presenting knowledge as a readymade commodity, a Happy Meal for Thinkers in a Hurry, it may well be doing more to retard creative thought than to spur it….
The quality of an encyclopedia is not determined by the number of experts who sign up to contribute but by the skill of the writers and editors who translate what the experts know into the language of the lay reader. That’s a job that experts and crowds are both profoundly ill-suited for.
The Bis Key Chronicles 