When I ask Wikipedia haters to explain why they are so disgruntled, they usually respond something like, "Any random sketch ball can go in there and add entries." My response to that usually is, "that sounds like unrestrained freedom of the public sphere to me." Exactly something that we need more of.
But in all reality I know that Wikipedia does not have true, unrestrained freedom of the public sphere, because if it did, Wikipedia would be unusable. It would be riddled with inaccuracies, cluttered with shameless advertising entries and ravaged by formatting incompetence and redundant inconsistencies that come from multiple authoring of single entries. Wikipedia is instead held in shape by a small oligarchy of top contributors that have created much of Wikipedia's entries and are responsible for making sure it stays clean and relevant. This is what gives Wikipedia its credibility, a vital ingredient in a successful information website in this day and age.
Some might consider this elite group of Wikipedia gurus an injustice to the Wikipedia public sphere appeal. However, these hundred or so individuals were not selected by a government agency or corporate exec board, they were simply granted this power for their frequent use and Wikipedia proficiency. In a media landscape dominated by corporate cop outs, infotainment brain drain and pandering to advertiser agendas, this uncommercial model for moderator delegation is monumental. Another valuable feature of Wikipedia is that if one of these top elites sees an entry that has problems, they will let the entry stand, and publish warnings with explanations at the top of the page. Often times this is either, lack of citation notices, "some experts say" generalizations, and bias warnings. The warnings encourage users to submit their corrections to the problems.
I can understand the position to leave Wikipedia out of scholarly bibliographies, but any other discontent is completely unjustified. For a democratic, user regulated information hub, that is free, easy, quick and advertiser free, Wikipedia is second to non. This masterpiece in the latest development of democratic internet communication power will be a corner stone for the future development of credible, reliable, legitimate information networks.
Many of the thoughts that I have just written, were stemmed from reading an article by Chris Wilson on these elite "chaperones" of the Web 2.0 world. Follow up by reading his indepth article.
