Cheney Shill wrote:
As Stephen Colbert said in an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: "What I love about it is that it brings democracy to information. For too long, the elites that study things got to say what is or isn't real." - The Colbert Report, 2007.05.24
Colbert has a point here. We surely do have crap like that.
But I think this is massively outweighed by the inverse effect. By putting power in the hands of the people, those people are having to confront issues and and learn skills that previously were the domain of the elite. The pyramid becomes wider. Not that Wikipedia is new in this; as far as I can tell things have been moving in this direction since Gutenberg.
Further, that crap is exactly what draws people in. Back before anybody had heard of Wikipedia, I was persuading my clients to use wikis as intranets. My number one trick for getting involvement was putting in mistakes: typos, formatting errors, and obvious omissions of information. Nobody would touch a finished-looking page. But give them something they could fix *right now* and they were hooked.
Heck, that's what hooked me. One minor fix three years ago, and now my favorite video game is CAT:CSD. Speaking of which, it was down to 15 speedy requests before I came to catch up on my mail, and now it's back up to 50. Onward! :-)
William