It’s no surprise that the Digital Universe is scarcely mentioned in the press—or in conversation—without the word “Wikipedia” trailing closely behind. This happens not only because “the contrast with Wikipedia turned out to be a valid one,” as Digital Universe Foundation president Bernard Haisch now points out, but because Larry Sanger, the Digital Universe’s director of distributed content, was a co-founder of Wikipedia, and actually found his way to the Digital Universe after Haisch read Sanger’s now-famous online essay, “Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism.” But the Digital Universe family tree extends back farther than the relatively recent Wikipedia.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Making_fun_of_Britannica

As far as credentialed experts, I sort of like that aspect of Wikipedia. Credentials aren’t any guarantee of accuracy, and there’s a long history of credentialed crackpots (not to mention that insistence on credentialed experts tends to enforce a more rigid orthodoxy of opinion). Interestingly, though, the subject came up just recently on the Wikipedia mailing list, and there are plans to have experts review Wikipedia articles for accuracy and give their stamp of approval, so a future Wikipedia article on Quake might say “reviewed by John Carmack”.

Tangentially, Dan Hunter and I have an article coming out that looks at amateur vs. professional content creation and whether there are implications for the copyright system.

http://www.bu.edu/law/news/ip/papers/Amateur-to-Amateur1.pdf

Tom Coates wrote an off-quoted blog entry that is a lot shorter, non-legal, and less copyright-centric.

http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/09/weblogs_and_the_mass_amateurisation_of_nearly_everything.shtml

The idea is that you don’t have to say “this is a crackpot theory” when you can more accurately say “so-and-so believes this, but his small group at [blah university] is the only one that agrees.” What Wikipedia *doesn’t* want to do is fall victim to rigid academia-style orthodoxy, where if it’s not represented at the current Big Conference in the Field, it’s automatically purged of all mention.

However, I’m starting to think of the NPOV as more of a stub than an article: in reality, most Wikipedia entries I look at, even ones on controversial issues, are quite good as resources for helping me to understand a topic. So, the real workings of Wikipedia are somehow not leading the system to get stuck in the shortcomings of this policy.

I like the idea of the Wikipedia, but is anyone else troubled by their policy of maintaining a neutral point of view? E.g., “that we should fairly represent all sides of a dispute, and not make an article state, imply, or insinuate that any one side is correct”? By definition, it requires giving equal credence to every opinion, no matter how unreasonable or unfalsifiable, merely because it exists!