A well-known quote from Lore Sjoberg sums up the situation:

The Wikipedia philosophy can be summed up this way: “Experts are scum.” For some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War — and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge — get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment.

Wikipedia is actually a good source of information about things that other information sources wouldn’t consider worth spending editor time or page space on. For instance, I had always wondered what the title of the Led Zeppelin song, “Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp,” meant. Turns out it’s the name of a small cottage in a valley in Wales, owned by a friend of Robert Plant’s father. This piece of information is in one book somewhere, and maybe one interview. And it’s on Wikipedia, accompanied by a photograph of the house.

Wikipedia’s great for that kind of thing.

For things that people are really interested in, though - things that are of interest to many, complicated, heavily investigated, the things that most Wikipedia users use Wikipedia to research - it fails, for the reasons I stated above. It continues to fail spectacularly to this day. And, as a physician who speaks to my patients and finds out what they know, I can tell you that it often fails dangerously by giving wrong information to people who desperately need right information.

I don’t contribute to Wikipedia much anymore, and I still use it. And I’m kind of fond of it. I’d miss it if it went away. But it was the first entry to fill a particular information void that has always existed. I am eagerly awaiting the next step, the thing that kicks it to the curb. (And if I knew what that was, I’d be building it.)

http://hardnews.ansci.usu.edu/opinion/083107_wikipedia.html

Perhaps one difference is that I reacted rather heavily, and was treated rather heavily, but that is more because of the nature of the article and the people controlling it, than anything else. Had I been lucky enough to have come across a relatively undisturbed article, as it had been 3 years prior, then I would have most likely had similar experiences, for some elements of my experiences are similar to this.

Wikipedia has a problem that stems from their introduction of NPOV. If you compare an article written from an expert yet biased POV to one written neutrally by an idiot, there is really no comparison - the expert version is far superior in every way. Expertise should never be the victim of neutrality.

What ideally should happen is that the most expert persons that are willing to contribute should be the primary people contributing to the article, and they are then mediated by someone who is neutral and who has some vague interest in the topic. This will create the ideal circumstance.

One problem with this is that the most expert people in the world probably couldn’t care less about wasting their time on Wikipedia, and it may be that only one expert, only from one of the perhaps 6 or 7 major points of view (especially with highly controversial topics) is willing to contribute, and hence it risks becoming horribly biased.

Bias should be discouraged, but not forbidden. Bias is natural, normal and a part of human nature. People can account for bias when using something as a resource tool. It is far more difficult to account for idiocy and factual inaccuracy.

And of course when accounting for bias, sometimes you end up with something that has so many different biases that it is impossible to work with accurately anyway.

A good essay, I think.