[alxp]

There's a fable warning about the problem of throwing out a suggestion because you think one needs to be made, and then everyone going along with it because it's what they think the group wants, when no individual actually wants to do that thing. It's called the Abilene Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox

[incompatible]

Wikipedia is actually a great example of how getting something started can eventually lead to something much better. Here's the first version of that article: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Abilene_paradox&#3...

That's what Wikipedia was like after it was created: random people writing a few words about some subject they thought they knew something about. It didn't seem like it would amount to much, at the time.

[pekk]

Maybe it hasn't amounted to as much as you think.

In addition to a great deal of general information substantially duplicating what you already could have found on the internet (much of Wikipedia is actually scraped/aggregated from elsewhere, which is the real use of crowdsourcing here), it's also jammed full of trivialities and utterly biased, misleading, politicized articles guarded jealously by special interest groups. All those interest groups together form one giant defensive cabal which rejects criticism of Wikipedia and is constantly begging for money to sustain itself. Because it's democratic, you see, and not dominated by those egghead academic experts (but rather by Wikipedia experts, who established their tenure by making an account and writing rarely-verified information to Wikipedia in a way that complied with the politics of Wikipedia incumbents).

Wikipedia could have put effort into seriously verifying incoming information, but that would have made it an elitist affair like academia. Or it could have seriously taken everything democratically, which would have made it a total populist mess. Instead it created its own insular oligarchy to tell everyone what is true or not. And the appointments of this oligarchy are utterly opaque, but they definitely aren't based on any combination of merit and democracy.

[splawn]

I disagree with your assessment that Wikipedia doesn't add value. It acts as an awesome aggregator and is usually a good place to start when learning about any topic. Im not going to play "name that fallacy", but your points against it seem weak to me. Of course its info is scraped and aggregated from other sources. Thats how information works. Thats normal even in academia. Im sure that on pages that don't have many watchers, a bad edit could go unnoticed for a long time, but this shouldn't be an issue for you, since you follow up on sources and practice critical thinking no matter what source you use .

[samegreatsleeve]

So wikipedia is a low quality content farm that shows up for every google search and prevents actual expert pages from being seen--taking revenue and visibility from experts--while providing lower quality content.

And that's a good thing to you.

An unreliable encyclopedia is the most useless thing in the world. An unreliable encyclopedia with the most powerful SEO in history...is a grave threat to human knowledge.

[splawn]

This is an interesting take on it. What are some examples of experts that are being silenced?

Usually when people criticize SEO, its over the methods used to get irrelevant links on pages, putting junk in your serps. Afaik wikipedia does well because people link to its content, not because of spam tactics.

[samegreatsleeve]

The experts aren't bing silenced, they just show up on the second page of google so get no hits.

The first page will often have literally 5+ links to wikipedia, and those articles will cite the never-visited reliable page but get a lot of the details wrong.

You're absolutely right that it's a cultural issue more so than a tech issue. Wikipedia marketing has managed to convince people that an amateur content farm should be the first stop for information. But why should your first stop be amateurs who often get it wrong?

Ask any academic how good wikipedia is for their specialty. It always ranges from "ok" to "terrible". And why would we expect anything else? How can amateurs be expected to understand, interpret, and report on reams of subtle developments in any area?

The best wikipedia articles are the ones that tend most toward plagiarism--literally just copying the words and concepts of an academic while barely rephrasing them to avoid copyright infringement. It's not worthwhile.

Meanwhile, every important article on wikipedia has a high quality, professionally written counterpart on Encyclopedia Britannica. What's the point of wikipedia?

For an easy example just search any topic in philosophy. Wikipedia comes up first. Read that, then read Stanford Encyclopedia, then read Encyclopedia Britannica.

Why is wikipedia the top hit? Because their SEO/marketing is overwhelming. It's definitely not due to quality! In contrast, the other two options being beat out by Wikipedia SEO are written by notable experts. The quality difference is enormous. EB and SEP can actually be relied on. On wikipedia you never know what important subtlety they got wrong.

Wikipedia is the eHow or expertsexchange of information. It's a drag on human knowledge. It needs to die.

[gertef]

[Citation needed.]