Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
There's something interesting about all of this discussion: no serious person in the wikipedia community, no matter where they may fall on the spectrum of "respect/deference to professors" holds the anti-elitist view that Sanger ascribed to us.
If anything, I think we're more elitist than that: we look at academia and say "Yes, pretty good, but we should do better."
I think there is a good deal of substance in Larry Sanger's and Robert McHenry's criticism. They are correct as long as they describe the problem they see. However, the outsider's perceived anti-elitism doesn't necessarily originate from an intentional anti-elitism in the community. And since it isn't intentional, it is quite impossible to "abandon" this anti-elitism, so Larry fails provide a solution. He suggests a fork of the project. Yes, maybe he should try this.
I personally think (does anybody know?) that the core of Wikipedia users (and contributors) still consists of people who look for information on the web only. If you write a blog entry, it is far more convenient to link to a Wikipedia article that explains a concept, than to link to or reference an article in Encarta or Britannica, to which the reader might not have access. (If the Wikipedia article doesn't exist, you might even take the time to write it.) This is the typical situation where Wikipedia wins over traditional encyclopedias. But there are many other situations where it does not, at least not yet, maybe next year. If a student wants a good overview of the history of Czech literature, she might be lucky and this topic happens to be well covered in Wikipeda, but more likely it is better presented in Britannica or even Encarta. The number of topics or areas that are well covered in Wikipedia is increasing for every year, but we are still far from the coverage of traditional encyclopedias.
A search on en.wikipedia for "history of Czech literature" gives very odd results. Maybe it's not just the contents, but also the search function that needs improvement. Go to encarta.msn.com and the same search yields the articles "Czech Literature" and "Book", or on britannica.com it yields "Czech literature", "Literature", "Czech Republic, history of", "Hus, Jan", and "Mathesius, Vilem".
So the student might try Wikipedia and be lucky or maybe not. But if the student asks a librarian, that librarian isn't going to risk his professional appearance on a source that depends on his being lucky. He is going to tell the student to use Britannica, nothing less. The library reference desk is a situation where traditional encyclopedias win and where Wikipedia loses big time. Correct me if I'm wrong.
At least in theory, the sales force of a commercial business has the double task of selling products (or services) and collecting information from prospective customers. If Britannica sales people discover that customers prefer the World Book Encyclopedia because of its illustrations, they will return and tell their editors that more and better illustrations are needed. Focus is then put on improving those aspects that make a difference in the competition. Free software developers don't get this kind input, which explains why Linux has been so slow in replacing Microsoft Windows on the desktop. And the Wikipedia community faces the same lack of input from outsiders. I don't know how to solve this. Maybe we need a sales force.