Quoting David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>:
On 27/10/2007, Steve Bennett
<stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This part of his quote is more troubling:
"The greatest problem with Wikipedia that we now find is that they are
highly selective in who should place information and where therefore they
will never really have a web-based encyclopaedia that is unbiased and
totally factual. It is ultimately at the whims of the few enlightened ones
who control what should be a great reference. Unfortunately we now see that
it is not."
The perception that Wikipedia is controlled by "the few" is painful, and
relatively common. In my experience, individual articles or sometimes
subject areas are indeed sometimes controlled by a "few", but certainly not
the whole thing. The vast majority of my edits never run into any kind of
problem editors. So why does this perception linger so long?
Because people would rather believe there is a conspiracy to suppress
the truth than that they are wrong.
To some extent that's the case. But it doesn't help matters that we
often aren't
nearly diplomatic enough with people with little or no prior experience with
editing Wikipedia. And I think there are occasions with cabalism does actually
occur or enough discussion occurs off Wikipedia that it could easily look like
cabalism to a bystander.