Quoting David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
On 27/10/2007, Steve Bennett stevagewp@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.