My experience is 100% to the contrary. By and large,
we're not
exclusively laypeople-- often we ARE the experts. Our math articles
are written by math experts, our chemistry articles are written by
chemists, our physics articles are written by physicists.
I think this is definitely true for articles in many of the hard
sciences--maths, physics, chemistry, etc.--but many articles in the
soft sciences are written only by hobbyists (for lack of a better
word).
Plus, however difficult it is to understand articles,
it's all the
more difficult to try to write without any access to them, going
exclusively by popular press accounts or abstracts. The results of
having access are almost guaranteed to be better than the current
situation, where some editors do have access, some editors don't have
access, and so it's hard to double-check each other's work.
That's true, and you have a point here. If more editors had access to
more, reliable content, they would be more able to check one another's
work--provided they could understand the content in question.
My experience, however, is that everyone in academia
LOVES Wikipedia--
a few old fogeys excepted perhaps. But people who like to learn love
a giant encyclopedia that's free and has entries on everything.
Academia loves wikipedia-- they just don't like it when it's used for
something it's not. A master carpenter loves having a power
screwdriver for home repairs-- he just doesn't want to go to his
jobsite and find his apprentices clumsily trying to use the blunt side
of a power screwdriver to hammer nails.
I'm not sure you're correct here. Most of academia, in my experience,
thinks Wikipedia is useful but flawed. _I_ think Wikipedia is useful
but flawed. If Wikipedia didn't claim to be an encyclopedia, and thus
claim to abide by all the relevant scholary content standards, it'd be
welcomed, I think, in academia.
Cheers,
—Thomas Larsen