Citizendium Blog

Edge asked me to sum up my thoughts on the experts vs. dabblers question:

Who Says We Know: On the New Politics of Knowledge 

This is something I’ve been meaning to write for a long time.  Here are a few bits:

… As wonderful as it might be that the hegemony of professionals over knowledge is lessening, there is a downside: our grasp of and respect for reliable information suffers.  …  The new politics of knowledge that I advocate would place experts at the head of the table, but — unlike the old order — gives the general public a place at the table as well.

…consider: what do we most want, as responsible, independent-minded researchers, out of an encyclopedia?  Primarily, I think most of us want mainstream expert opinion stated clearly and accurately; but we don’t want to ignore minority and popular views, either, precisely because we know that experts are sometimes wrong, even systematically wrong.

I’ll have no truck with the view that simply because something is out of the mainstream—unscientific, irrational, speculative, or politically incorrect—it therefore does not belong in an encyclopedia. …

…experts are—albeit fallibly—the best-suited to articulate what expert opinion is.  It is for the most part experts who create the resources that fact-checkers use to check facts.  This makes their direct input in an encyclopedia invaluable.

Wikipedia’s defenders … are entirely committed to what I call dabblerism, by which I mean the view that no one should have any special role or authority in a content creation system simply on account of their expertise. …

… One has to wonder what the results would have been if Nature had chosen 1,000 Britannica articles randomly, and then matched Wikipedia articles up with those.

… Surely it isn’t impossible for professors to exit the cathedral — to borrow Eric Raymond’s metaphor — and wander the bazaar, offering guidance and highlighting what is excellent. Will that necessarily make the bazaar less of a bazaar?

Wikipedia is deeply egalitarian.  One of its guiding principles is epistemic (knowledge) egalitarianism.  According to epistemic egalitarianism, we are all fundamentally equal in our authority or rights to articulate what should pass for knowledge; the only grounds on which a claim can compete against other claims are to be found in the content of the claim itself, never in who makes it.

Ultimately, at the bottom of the debate, the deep modern commitment to specialization is in an epic struggle with an equally deep modern commitment to egalitarianism.  It’s Truth versus Equality, and as much as I love Equality, if it comes down to choosing, I’m on the side of Truth.

There might be some commentary on Edge coming out within the next week.  Could be lots of fun!