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Thursday, May 25, 2006

The great Wikipedia debate

Source: Between the Lines

Nicholas Carr has pronounced that Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia that anyone can edit, is dead. He writes that it "died the way the pure products of idealism always do, slowly and quietly and largely in secret, through the corrosive process of compromise." Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales calls this a "staggeringly bizarre argument," saying that of the 1,151,768 English articles, just 154 are under semi-protection, which allows only a select few to edit them. This is in response to certain – usually politicized - Wikipedia entries having been edited to include questionable or false statements. I agree with Dan Farber that civilizing Wikipedia has included constraints and compromises, just like the constraints we put on American "democracy." Wikipedia and the US are not pure democracies, but they're not dictatorships either. And the ongoing question wrestled with is the same. Are we making the right compromises?

That said, what's really right in all this is that Nick Carr can openly challenge Wikipedia on ideals and spark an international blog dialog. Blogs are one of the purest forms of democracy we've got. Protect them at all costs.