Wikipedia is flawed at a fundamental, philosophical level, in that it is biased towards the inaccurate, the ignorant, and the trivial. Imagine we have two Wikipedians. One is a tenured professor of theology at a well-respected private university, with many publications to his name and a reputation as a serious scholar. The other is a seventeen-year-old high-school dropout without a job living in his parents’ basement. On any article, including articles regarding theology, Wikipedia’s fundamental philosophy gives precedence to the high-school dropout rather than the professor. Why? Because according to Wikipedia, the strength of open-source encyclopedias is that anyone can edit them; anyone can contribute some tiny tidbit of information, no matter how uncredentialed they are. Democracy in action, right? One man, one vote, and the professor and the dropout’s votes count for exactly the same. Except that the dropout is utterly ignorant of theology, and the professor is an expert. And yet in an edit war, the professor will lose. Because the professor has a job. To maintain his expertise, he has to research. He has to lecture. He has to write and he has to publish. He can’t hang around and edit-snipe an article on Wikipedia regarding transubstantiation no matter how much he would like to. The dropout has plenty of time to tinker with Wikipedia. He has lots of time to revert any edits anyone makes to his (ignorant) views on transubstantiation. So he wins by default.
This, coincidentally, is why at several Wiki-related conventions, speakers were actually charged for the right to address the conventioneers. Traditionally, speakers at conventions are given a small stipend to cover costs of travel, lodging, etc., because the assumption is that they are speaking from their expertise, and that expertise is valuable. However, if, like Wikipedia, you view all contributors as equally expert, then it becomes impossible to winnow down potential speakers. Unless you charge them. Money, not knowledge, becomes the coin of the realm when objectivity is thrown out the window.
Because that’s what Wikipedia is. It’s the subjective encyclopedia, premised on the view that reality is democratic, with all viewpoints equally valid. But reality is not a democracy. It’s a dictatorship: the dictatorship of the real.
