expert knowledge on Wikipedia (Score 1)

The latest buzz-word in Wikipedia politics is "elitism." In this debate, there are the Wikipedia stalwarts who believe in the infallable wisdom of Jimbo Wales and respond to any criticism by pointing out Wikipedia "policies" which say that if you don't agree with them then go start your own Wikipedia. On the other side of this debate are those who are very unhappy with the present model (mostly experts in their fields who have become frustrated by seeing their work destroyed by people who are either fanatical or ignorant. It is argued that Wikipedia's anti-elitist model is flawed and that expert control over content is needed in order for wikipedia to constantly improve - something that Jimbo Wales' anarchist model predicts but (imho) fails to meet that prediction on a wide scale. I believe that the elitist model is the correct one. Wikipedia likes to compare itself to open source, but good open source projects value expert knowledge and hierchial control. Wikipedia must somehow find a way to ackowledge the contribution of demonstratably knowledgable people. Entire fields of knowledge within Wikipedia are under the de facto control of fanatics and useful idiots who vastly outnumber experts. The idea of having experts every concievable topic continuously editing a free online encylopedia is wishful thinking. But it is still reasonable to work towards such a goal. But the change cannot take place in the back-end. For Wikipedia to harness the knowledge of expert and give them incentive to contribute, change must first occur at the front-end meaning at the user interface level. Firsly, the format of correspondence is completely ridiculous. There is absolutely no systematic form of communication on the so-called "talk pages." The whole idea of having a totally seperate conversation for each article is insanity. Communication on wikipedia should take in a far more centralized manner, where users interested in specific topics can see all of the discussions going on in multiple formats, and they should be able to view and contribute to these discussions through a forum-type interface. This would help attract editors' attention to more articles, form communities, allow for coherent and decisive discussions on far-reaching subjects, and would help for consensus to be reached on controversial subjects. Secondly, the editing process needs to be changed. There needs to be systematic version release control system, similar to that used in the open source software development model. For example, changes on non-current event articles being edited at a high frequency should have a system in place for new edits to accumulate in a draft and then have a scheduled release of the updated article. This sort of thing requires a better mode of communication between editors. Thirdly, the editing interface has to be vastly improved. If that requires moving the editing interface out of the web browser and onto a custom built word processing application, then so be it. In order to really edit on Wikipedia you need to understand web page programming and you need learn Wikipedia's own arbitrary mark-up language. The editing interface is terrible and it needs to be completely changed. For a project like wikipedia, no current web-based content editing technology is suffucient as far as I know. The editing interface MUST change. Finally, once all of this happens, Wikipedia will be ripe for a serious influx of expert knowledge. Expert discussions that still happen on USENET would begin moving to Wikipedia. A system would exist for editors to collaborate and have enough control over their content to prevent ignorant and fanatical people from destroying information. Subject-oriented communities would form, allowing for institutionalized expert control over specific content. Experts, universities and corporations would have the incentive to contribute, by being recognized by their peers and by being acknowledged by name. Consequently, articles will have credible (and even well-known) experts cited as direct authors and it will be ensured that even controversial and obscure subjects are continually improving over time and not being regularly destroyed by anonymous, ignorant, fantical trolls. None of this can happen until Jimbo Wales and the people around him put their egos and politics down and make wikipedia into a project that doesn't fear change.