Wikipedia was the topic of a brief conversation on a recent argument night. More recently, Snit and Ray recommended new articles on Wikipedia -- one in The Atlantic and the other in The New Yorker.

In the latter, written by Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff, the author asks the Britannica's President, Jorge Cauz, for an anaology with which to compare Britannica and Wikipedia. His response was "Wikipedia is to Britannica as 'American Idol' is to the Julliard School."

What analogy would you use? Which has the greater life expectancy at this point? What do you think of the articles? My answers are below. Perhaps you will add yours.

In general the Atlantic article, by Marshall Poe, struck me as a typical, fact-filled, good story-telling Atlantic article. The New Yorker piece struck me as similar to a Creationist mocking the idea that evolution and the blind forces of nature could have ever created something so exquisitely designed as human beings. The quotes from Mr. Cauz came off like an epitaph.

Schiff gives only a tiny bit of the history that the Atlantic article does, but ten times as much attitude, e.g.

This is a curious argument for a number of reasons. For starters, the response is perfectly relevant and logical. If you designed a radically new form of automobile and people criticized it because it sometimes crashes, it is perfectly appropriate to point out that current autos crash as well. Secondly, if it is a sign of immaturity to minimize some instrinsic aspect of a thing by citing issues in an entirely different entity, then Ms. Schiff appears to have some growing up to do herself. She uses the same sort of tactic multiple times in that very article -- as just one example, she criticizes Wikipedia by stating that the present takes precedent over the past, explaining:

If the fact that traditional encyclopedias have similar errors may not be used by Wikipedians to put their errors in perspective -- if it's immature to respond to criticisms by use of comparisons, then why is it a valid criticism of content such as the "generally good" Augustine article to point out that the Britney Spears article has more text? Is there some sort of zero-sum game in typed characters that makes the Spears entry diminish the value of things like the Augustine entry?

One of the very interesting elements of the Poe article is the realization of just how much Wikipedia's strengths surprised its makers. Perhaps this should not be so surprising in retrospect, because what we appear to be learning about information management from experiments like Wikipedia is highly counter-intuitive. It is (or was) hard to believe that an chaotic, open forum with relatively little governance (despite Schiff's pejoritive description of Wikipedia as a "regulatory thicket") -- where anyone can basically edit any page -- might actually result in accuracy that approaches or exceeds that of carefully chosen experts.

We went through a similar process in software. It was entirely counter-intuitive that you could make software highly secure by making its source code freely available to anyone. And, I believe, it is very similar to the position of Christian fundamentalist "Creationists." How could random accidental mutations guided only by very loosely governed factors of nature ever result in something that seems so exquisitely designed as a human being? It just seems to us that some human or anthropomorphic archtitects must have carefully planned such things.

I believe that the increasing importance and accuracy of Wikipedia relative to the E.B. is all but inevitable. The comments of Jorge Cauz, quoted approvingly by Schiff, only strengthen this belief. If it doesn't happen with Wikipedia as currently constituted, something very similar will inevitably take it's place, because the 'process' is superior. It doesn't seem like it should be, but it is. Cauz doesn't even see this possibility, regardless of all trend lines, which is why he and Schiff come off like rich stable owners, haughtily pooh-poohing the naive belief that automobiles could replace the horse.

My metaphor for the future is that Encyclopedia Britannica is to Wikipedia as the Journal of Forensic Odonto-Stomatology is now to Britannica. Britannica may have a more elite average contributor, but its general use will become increasingly rare.

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