July 10, 2006

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Nick Carr links to a great interview with three living, breathing Wikipedians who aren’t Jimmy Wales. Here’s the cash:

Dirk Riehle: 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?

Elisabeth “Elian” Bauer: 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.

Kizu Naoko: Elian is right.

And I love this broad-minded comment, the first on Carr’s post:

Our founding fathers created a wiki, representative democracy, where everyone (supposedly) has an equal voice.