This Wikipedia article about David Neft is interesting to me, because David was a client of mine when I used to conduct large "Audit Bureau of Circulations" market studies for Gannett. David was one of the smartest people I've ever worked on behalf of.

What is especially noteworthy (though not at all surprising) to me is how this article was essentially plunked down by one editor in June 2006, and it has hardly changed a bit in the 3.5 years since.

Thus further reinforcing our theory that "crowd collaboration" is very often no better than the "single editor" approach to building an encyclopedia article.

This is quite obvious to us and I have many examples of this. How to persuade Wikipedians (and most of the world) of the truth of this. The Wisdom of Crowds is one of the 3 or 4 silly ideas which sustain the Wikipedia cult. Probably the main silly idea. If you believe this you believe it's OK to treat subjectg matter experts like sh1t - another expert will soon come along. Vandenberg even tried to persuade me that an expert on medieval philosophy or history of logic would eventually come along and make good the gaps. But as you can see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_logic#Metalogic

It still says 'This section requires expansion'. There just aren't enough people who (a) understand the subject matter (b) are stupid enough to edit Wikipedia.

With respect, I think that's a misrepresentation of "the wisdom of crowds", and a very good reason why editors (no names, no pack drill) who hold contrarian ideas should be cherished, rather than chased away from wikipedia like incivil pariahs..

Timurid Emirates. My high quality contribution to Wikipedia. Basically unchanged except cosmetically for the past 6 years. Based on information gleaned from the computer game Europa Universalis II. Probably completely inaccurate.

American Bridge Company has had SOME changes in the 4 years since I plopped it down. But not shedfuls, I wouldn't say... averaging about an edit a month, more or less....

But then, companies are boring.

In many cases, crowd-sourcing is inferior to a traditional print publication. Let's consider BLPs, for example. There are 427,055 BLPs and 1,707 administrators on Wikipedia. Let's assume that the crowd grows on Wikipedia, and one day every BLP gets at least one edit per week. Therefore, it should be checked once a week to make certain any new edits are responsible and reasonable.

Let's also assume that all the BLPs are divided among all the admins, and each admin is expected to check his or her assigned BLPs once a week. This means that each admin would have to check 250 BLPs a week, or 36 a day.

Unless you are paying admins to monitor the crowd, you will never get this level of commitment from them. That is why the old model of professional publishers and editors, who produce content that is set into print and bound into books, is a better model for producing BLPs. As long as Wikipedia remains an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit," it should not call itself an "encyclopedia" and produce BLPs. The Wikipedia model does not scale well if the crowd gets too big.

Not to mention, depending on how you qualify it, there are only about 850 or 900 "active" administrators on Wikipedia.