Last Monday I talked about the free software/open source movement in software and mentioned Wikipedia as an example. There is a good article about Wikipedia at Tech Central Station "The Faith based encyclopedia" which describes what it has achieved but also provide a critque of its limitations:
"As of November 2004, according to the project's own counts, nearly 30,000 contributors had written about 1.1 million articles in 109 different languages...."
"One person's "knowledge," unfortunately, may be another's ignorance. To put the Wikipedia method in its simplest terms:
1. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published.
2. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified.
Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:
3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy..."
"...Take the statements of faith in the efficacy of collaborative editing, replace the shibboleth "community" with the banal "committee," and the surprise dissolves before your eyes. Or, if you are of a statistical turn of mind, think a little about regression to the mean and the shape of the normal distribution curve. However closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler..."
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