Wikipedia again

Taking a moment away from my massive addiction to Facebook, I found a few interesting articles about Wikipedia featuring an interview with the "liberal" creator of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and "conservative" Mr. Robert Cox. Here are a further posts about Wikipedia, from various points of view.

Warning: It's a very long read, you could just read the interview (first post), and then scroll to the "Cult of the Amateur" section in the last article. For those with some guts to get into great detail, the second article is amazing, and pedantically outlines everything that needs to be said about Wikipedia's poor quality in some pretty exacting detail.

It certainly won't change the opinions of my fellow free-information software engineers, but it certainly does illustrate that my opinion is not the ramblings of a lone lunatic.

While I was reading the first article, I found three things stuck with me:

1. Why are Americans so obsessed with labeling this or that person "liberal" or "conservative"? It seems to be a label that seeks to divide people into two groups, an never acknowledging that there is a middle ground, or even that the true situation is very much a spectrum - a whole, massive range of middle is possible. Such a black-and-white mentality clouds the discussion and draws battle lines for lots of people to knock heads, but will foster very little compromise.
   
2. There seems to be a kind of xenophobic fear that these "conservatives" have (and Jimmy Wales loves to exploit, pointing it out repeatedly) that the rest of the world is not as conservative as the U.S., and in fact far more liberal. Jimbo seems to want to paint Robert Cox, in that article at least, to be a rest-of-the-world fearing anti-liberal campaigner. But it really does get you thinking. What is "neutrality"? What is liberal/conservative, as a label, really?
   
3. Jimmy Wales is not very good at defending Wikipedia - he's okay at re-explaining things that his detractors get wrong (either accidentally or deliberately), but he's not very good at giving an impartial point of view or backing up his own side with anything that is not anecdotal or personally opinionated.
   

Let me know what you think!

The last article goes onto a tangential point, and says:

And so, having gone on for so long, I at long last come to my point. The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. The layoffs we've recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.

What do my fellow free-information software engineers think? Are we really so idealistic to believe that all the open-source, free-software anti-corporation software we are creating isn't going to affect the software economy and ultimately make us poorer? It's kind of a loaded question, I know, but I feel just a little bit queasy every time I hear open-source software described in semi-rapturous tones, as if being open-source is an inherent good.

I'm far from a free-market loving uber-capitalist, but I am very wary of points of view that seem more like dogma than cogent arguments.