A co-founder of the excellent wikipedia has written an interesting article titled “Why Wikipedia must jettison it’s anti-elitism” over at kuro5hin (good to see some decent articles appearing there again).
Whilst now no longer with the project (due to funding reasons), the author tackles head-on the issue of anti-elitism in the project. It’s a critical issue for the project that is needed to take it to the ‘trusted source’ status, but unfortunately the very idea of wikipedia is that it’s open to anybody to contribute, not just “experts”. This very openness - and the compromises that ensue - ultimately, ironically even, detract from it’s perceived quality, but are also the reason for it’s success.
Without some means of finding a route to becoming a ‘trusted source’ (along the lines of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example), the Wikipedia project won’t - in my view - enter the main-stream non-techie world quite as well as it’s hoped. So it’s unfortunate that - as elsewhere on the internet - trolls, spam and generally abusive behaviour - adversely affect attempts to build something so wonderful.
The idea I think is most likely to work is that of a ‘trusted version’ that could be built from the already submitted articles. This could then make it’s way to schools, libraries and perhaps syndicated elsewhere. Much like the stable, vendor supported Linux distributions, are put out for those not keen to recompile the tip Linux kernel version and GNU tool set.
Whichever approach is used, it’ll still not stop me using (and contributing on occasion) to Wikipedia. But then I’m a techie, and bound to say that. The real test will be it’s widespreadh use and trust by libraries, schools and teachers.
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