[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias

[David Gerard]

kosebamse wrote:
>Alphax alphasigmax at gmail.com wrote at Tue Nov 15 12:15:00 UTC 2005:

>>What worries me is that with our growing popularity, we're going to have
>>more experts arriving on our doorstep, trying to write articles on their
>>specialist areas, and leave in disgust when some 2-bit moron votes "d,
>>nn. cruft".

>As far as I can say, that has always been a serious problem. It's not a
>matter of elitism. An expert who is used to discussing his views  with
>well-informed people on an academic level will not enjoy the experience of
>having to defend basic and established knowledge of his field against
>schoolkids whose only expertise is with video games. I am offering no
>opinion on the desirability of it, but the latter probably form a very
>sizable fraction of our user base.


The problem here is the degree of it. The assumption of bad faith that
appears to be far too common on AFD has led to an expert being *driven
off* Wikipedia by people who are not only proudly ignorant, but are
doing their best to get anti-expert bias made policy and the way
things work around here.


- d.