User:Stbalbach/Hotel Wikifornia

(work in progress)

Hotel Wikifornia, or why Citizendium is right.

The proverbial "Hotel California" has become emblematic of Wikipedia for many people, a love affair at first which turns into a nightmare difficult to walk away from.

On the surface Wikipedia seems like a good idea, and it truly is a profound innovation. Wikipedia started out as a new concept and to ensure growth and survival it created some rules such as anyone can edit and a verification policy that remain today hallmarks of the project. However, these adaptive traits also foster an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism and anti-social behavior that are destructive to individual contributors well-being, and thus ultimately the organization as a whole.

To help understand the problem and how intractable it is, it is best to start with an examination of Wikipedia's core policy of Verification:
 * Articles should contain only material that has been published by reliable sources.
 * Editors adding new material should cite a reliable source, or it may be challenged or removed by any editor.
 * The obligation to provide a reliable source lies with the editors wishing to include the material, not with those seeking to remove it.

Verification is at the heart of what makes Wikipedia Reliable and thus useful.

On the surface the Verification policy seems reasonable. However, as any serious scholar knows, citations can be found that will support anything you want, a citation doesn't make it true or accurate; and conversely, many things that are true and accurate have no useful sources to cite. It goes beyond simple factual citations such as the source of a quotation, it includes larger issues such as, what kind of information is important to include in an article, what is the most important information the reader should know, how does one put the topic in contextual relationship with other similar topics - these are subjective calls and they require someone with an expertise knowledge.

This contradiction, between Wikipedia's Verification policy and the reality of the nature of facts and citations, has created a strange Alice in Wonderland anti-intellectual environment. Articles have the appearance of authenticity and objectivity (look at all those footnotes!) but they can be shaky scaffoldings. For example citations taken out of context from the original source can be mis-represented, sources that are not mainstream or represent minority views given undo weight, citations for no other reason than to resolve an inexperienced editors desire that everything have a citation.

This last point leads to a new problem. Wikipedia is an anonymous system, thus anything and everything can be challenged to provide a source. This means a 15 year old kid who knows nothing about molecular biology can "challenge" the tenured professor who wrote the article to provide facts that are common knowledge. At first this may seem acceptable because it improves the articles. However as mentioned above many things in articles can not be cited - the type of information. For example someone want