On 5/28/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
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.
In addition to encouraging people to become jacks-of-all-trades, Wikipedia has demonstrated that given a large enough pool of people, you'll find experts in essentially anything, who will percolate to the places that they're necessary.
It's not a pretty process, but it works.