Issues  httpwwwkurohinorgstory  Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its AntiElitism  By lsanger in OpEd Fri Dec   at  AM EST Tags Internet all tags  Internet    Wikipedia has started to hit the big time Accordingly several critical articles have come out including The FaithBased Encyclopedia by a former editorinchief of Britannica and a very widelysyndicated AP article that was given such titles as When Information Access Is So Easy Truth Can Be Elusive  These articles are written by people who appear not to appreciate the merits of Wikipedia fully I do however I cofounded Wikipedia I have since left the project  Wikipedia does have two big problems and attention to them is long overdue These problems could be eliminated by eliminating a single root problem If the projects managers are not willing to solve it I fear a fork a new edition under new management for the nontechies reading this will probably be necessary      Let me preface this by saying that I know Wikipedia is very cool A lot of people do not think so but of course they are wrong So the following must be taken in the spirit of someone who knows and supports the mission and broad policy outlines of Wikipedia very well  First problem lack of public perception of credibility particularly in areas of detail The problem I would like to point out is not that Wikipedia is unreliable The alleged unreliability of Wikipedia is something that the above TechCentralStation and AP articles make much of but that is not my point and I am not interested in discussing that point per se  My point is that regardless of whether Wikipedia actually is more or less reliable than the average encyclopedia it is not perceived as adequately reliable by many librarians teachers and academics The reason for this is not far to seek those librarians etc note that anybody can contribute and that there are no traditional review processes You might hasten to reply that it does work nonetheless and I would agree with you to a large extent but your assurances will not put this concern to rest  You might maintain that people are already using Wikipedia a lot and that that implies a great deal of trust This is true as far as it goes but people use many sources that they themselves believe to be unreliable via Google searches for example I do so all the time though perhaps I shouldnt Perhaps Wikipedia is better described as one of those sources regarded as unreliable which people read anyway And in this case one might say theres no problem Wikipedia is being read and it is of minimally adequate and increasing reliability What more could you ask In other words why does a perception of unreliability matter  I am willing to grant much of this reply I think merely that there are a great many benefits that accrue from robust credibility to the public One benefit but only one is support and participation by academia I am on the academic job market now and I felt it was necessary to explain my views about Wikipedias credibility for potential employers A great many of my colleagues are not at all impressed with the project but more about that in a bit  Another benefit accruing from robust public credibility is even more widespread use and support by teachers schools libraries and the general publicprecisely the people who want to use what they believe to be a credible encyclopedia To the extent that the project is not reaching and being supported by these people it is not succeeding as well as it might  Perhaps you might also maintain that while Wikipedia does not now have a reputation for reliability it will eventually once enough studies proving its reliability are done and once people are more familiar with the concept behind the project This is hard to argue with but it is also hard to support because it involves predicting the future and the future when it comes to public opinion is extremely unpredictable It would be better to do something to help guarantee a reputation for reliability  Wikipedia has another sort of credibility problem mentioned in passing above and I fear that time is not a solution to this problem the way it might be to the foregoing one Namely one can make a good case that when it comes to relatively specialized topics outside of the interests of most of the contributors the projects credibility is very uneven If the project was lucky enough to have a writer or two wellinformed about some specialized subject and if their work was not degraded in quality by the majority of people whose knowledge of the subject is based on paragraphs in books and mere mentions in college classes then there might be a good credible article on that specialized subject Otherwise there will be no article at all a very amateurishsounding article or an article that looks like it might once have been pretty good but which has been hacked to bits by hoi polloi Am I sounding elitist enough for you yet Just wait One has only to compare the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy to Wikipedias Philosophy section From the point of view of a specialist lets just say that Wikipedia needs a lot of work  Second problem the dominance of difficult people trolls and their enablers I stopped participating in Wikipedia when funding for my position ran out That does not mean that I am merely mercenary I might have continued to participate were it not for a certain poisonous social or political atmosphere in the project  There are many ways to explain this problem and I will start with just one Far too much credence and respect accorded to people who in other Internet contexts would be labelled trolls There is a certain mindset associated with unmoderated Usenet groups and mailing lists that infects the collectivelymanaged Wikipedia project if you react strongly to trolling that reflects poorly on you not necessarily on the troll If you attempt to take trolls to task or demand that something be done about constant disruption by trollish behavior the other listmembers will cry censorship attack you and even come to the defense of the troll This drama has played out thousands of times over the years on unmoderated Internet groups and since about the fall of  on the unmoderated Wikipedia  Wikipedia has to its credit done something about the most serious trolling and other kinds of abuse there is an Arbitration Committee that provides a process whereby the most disruptive users of Wikipedia can be ejected from the project  But there are myriad abuses and problems that never make it to mediation let alone arbitration A few of the projects participants can be not to put a nice word on it pretty nasty And this is tolerated So for any person who can and wants to work politely with wellmeaning rational reasonably wellinformed peoplewhich is to say to be sure most people working on Wikipediathe constant fighting can be so offputting as to drive them away from the project This explains why I am gone it also explains why many others including some extremely knowledgeable and helpful people have left the project  The root problem antielitism or lack of respect for expertise There is a deeper problemor I at least regard it as a problemwhich explains both of the aboveelaborated problems Namely as a community Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise As a community far from being elitist which would in this context mean excluding the unwashed masses it is antielitist which in this context means that expertise is not accorded any special respect and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated This is one of my failures a policy that I attempted to institute in Wikipedias first year but for which I did not muster adequate support was the policy of respecting and deferring politely to experts Those who were there will I hope remember that I tried very hard  I need not recount the history of how this nascent policy eventually withered and died Ultimately it became very clear that the most active and influential members of the projectbeginning with Jimmy Wales who hired me to start a free encyclopedia project and who now manages Wikipedia and Wikimediawere decidedly antielitist in the abovedescribed sense  Consequently nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia because they willat least if they are editing articles on articles that are subject to any sort of controversybe forced to defend their edits on article discussion pages against attacks by nonexperts This is not perhaps so bad in itself But if the expert should have the gall to complain to the community about the problem he or she will be shouted down at worst or politely asked to work with persons who have proven themselves to be unreasonable at best  This lack of respect for expertise explains the first problem because if the project participants had greater respect for expertise they would have long since invited a board of academics and researchers to manage a culled version of Wikipedia one that I think would not directly affect the way the main project is run But because project participants have such a horror of the traditional deference to expertise this sort of proposal has never been taken very seriously by most Wikipedians leading the project now And so much the worse for Wikipedia and its reputation N