In defence of Wikipedia

Now that the excitement over Wikipedia's removal of an inaccurate story has died down, some timely turn-of-year reflections...

The BBC's columnist Bill Thompson already attacked the hysteria evident on both sides of the debate & drew attention to the coincidentally published Nature report that found Wikipedia's scientific accuracy to be on a par with that of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The latest edition of David Weinberger's JOHO newsletter offers a witty critique of the misinformation circulated about the episode by conventional media, who see their monolpoly on knowledge threatened by this snotty little upstart. He relishes the irony of newspapers misreporting the measures taken by Wikipedia to improve the trustworthiness of their material, but also makes the more serious point that conventional media have been wrong-footed by a shift in the nature of knowledge itself:

The media literally can't hear that humility, which reflects accurately the fluid and uneven quality of Wikipedia. The media amplifying our general cultural assumptions have come to expect knowledge to be coupled with arrogance
(...) The media have a cognitive problem with a publisher of knowledge that modestly does not claim perfect reliability, does not back up that claim through a chain of credentialed individuals, and that does not believe the best way to assure the quality of knowledge is by disciplining individuals for their failures
(...)With Wikipedia, the balance of knowing shifts from the individual to the social process.

He makes illuminating points about the way "identity" works in such ventures, too.