In its July 31, 2006, issue The New Yorker ran “Know It All,” an article by Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer (who curiously is not yet the subject of a Wikipedia article). She explores the epistemology (in a crude reduction, the wisdom of the masses vs. the knowledge and authority of experts–Marx vs. Plato?) inherent in Wikipedia and how that position evolved from Jimmy Wales's initial vision of a comprehensive, free, and authoritative Web-based encyclopedia.

Hot on its heels is historian Marshall Poe's “the Hive” in the September 2006 issue of The Atlantic. Poe describes the evolution of Wikipedia and its increasing discovery of the need for policy and, dare I say, referees?

And not least–at least in terms of the ink it has received elsewhere–there is Jim Giles's December 15, 2005 comparison in Nature (sorry, subscribers only) of Britannica and Wikipedia. Or, as it has been cast in the popular press and over time, Wikipedia vs. Britannica. Giles was a speaker at Wikimania. He placed his article in the context of journalism, not research. A careful listener with a truly NPOV (”neutral point of view,” a value Wikipedia embraces) would learn that it was not the knock-out punch that many Wikipedians believed. At best, having an equal number of factual errors as Britannica and topic-for-topic scientific articles is at best a Pyrrhic victory. As Giles noted, some of the referees in Nature's blind process reported that some articles from Wikipedia were difficult to follow and less coherent than the Britannica articles. Blogging from Wikimania's Harvard Law School venue, Meredith Farkas reported on Giles's session. She notes that “What I got out of this is that the idea of authority is a really murky one and should take much more than accuracy into account.” What I got out of it was Giles's admission that factual accuracy is not the only criterion by which to judge encyclopedia articles. Factual accuracy is the gold standard for almanacs, but is just one of several relevant criteria for judging the value of encyclopedias. Coherence and readability are criteria at least as valuable! Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales himself called upon Wikipedians to shift their focus from racking up quantities of edits, telling them that “We can no longer feel satisfied and happy when we see these [article] numbers going up…. We should continue to turn our attention away from growth and towards quality.”

With wit and wisdom, Stephen Colbert has put his finger on Wikipedia's potentially pernicious effect–i.e., mob rule. Even though Poe cites the entry on himself as proof that Wikipedia's processes work in favor of truth, it is conceivable that eventually Wikipedians could canonize by consensus the “truth” that Iraq had WMDs and who knows what other majority-held opinions masquerading as truth.

A consensus process confers new meanings on words or strips them of meanings. Language usage evolves organically. Knowledge of our world evolves through very different processes, processes in which ultimately authority matters. It is the authority of the one who can demonstrate proof, not the authority of rank, title, or position. This is, of course, much clearer in the natural sciences, though even there newer, more demonstrable knowledge supplants older knowledge. It is murkier in fields such as the humanities. Nevertheless debate based on theory and research matters in the humanities. That debate can never be isolated from opinion. Critical thinking and judgment must be applied to sort them out.