This is a very foolish article, but fortunately at least one commenter spotted what ws wrong.
Wikipedia is based around a strong hierarchy between experts and everyone else. Credentialed experts do primary research. They look at the actual stuff. Wiki-editors do secondary research. They read the sources that the experts write and debate the meaning of those sources. This is the governance that is built into the site, and it is a hierarchical one. Wiki-editors would only be “fellow travelers†with experts if they did primary research themselves. But how many times have you seen wiki-editors cite their own research in French or Russian archives, or their own experiments on bacteria, or their own mathematical proofs? Never. And that’s the difference.
Wikipedia hardly devalues experts. It enshrines them like never before. Every statement in a Wikipedia article has to be backed up with a citation to an article or book produced by a journalist, an academic, a scientist, or some other credentialed expert who has carried out primary research according to currently prevailing methods in journalism or academia. In no way are the wiki-writers “fellow travelers†with these expert sources in the governance of the site. Their job is only to debate which wording best characterizes the existing expert sources for the purposes of an encyclopedia article. This is all great as a learning exercise, and I applaud them for doing so, but it does not equalize experts and readers.
Far from dethroning expert knowledge or authors, Wikipedia is in fact the single greatest collection of citations to experts in the history of the world. It is a monument to expertise in fact.
http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/wikipedia-an...#comment-195704