Dirk Riehle posts an interview with several active Wikipedians on "How and Why Wikipedia Works." Lots of detail, plus this interesting nugget (that Science Library Pad caught):
DR: What about the 'collective intelligence' or 'collective wisdom' argument: That given enough authors, the quality of an article will generally improve? Does this hold true for Wikipedia?
EB: No, it does not. The best articles are typically written by a single or a few authors with expertise in the topic. In this respect, Wikipedia is not different from classical encyclopedias.
KN: Elian is right. Also, most of the short articles remain short and of rather poor content.
Technorati Tags: encyclopedia, wiki
The promotion of Wiki in education is a real problem. Especially in view of the culture of lies and plagiarism in western education examinations. If the truth that is accepted is the last post by some dumb high school student in Seattle, which can be what you often get - are not the blind leading the blind? I have a collegue who has real problems keeping his section of Wiki clean. Facts are not and never will be culturally or democratically negotiated truths. They are verifiable and contingent upon the truth but there seem to be too many people in the education establishment who have a variable definition of what truth is.
Posted by: John Nutt | December 08, 2006 at 05:38 AM