Wikipedia: Experts are us

Wikipedia’s egalitarian ethic and cooperative process have led to accusations that ‘verifiability’ is replacing accuracy. But expertise is alive and well on the online encyclopaedia – as long as you know where to look.

by Mathieu O’Neil
Le Monde Diplomatique

The internet was invented by “hackers” – computer engineers and students influenced by the counter-culture, and therefore resistant to traditional forms of authority and hierarchy. The only status sought by hackers was the recognition of excellence in coding, freely granted by their peers. That expertise should be autonomous from state or business contexts was confirmed by the development of free software, where remunerations are wholly symbolic. The opening up of online production to non-hackers – Web 2.0 – has expanded the challenge to conventional expertise to a mass scale, with some troubling consequences. But it also opens up new possibilities for political engagement.

In online collaborative projects, information, just like computer code, is produced independently. In weblogs and wikis, respect and responsibilities are not attributed to participants because of a diploma or a professional identity accredited by an institution. Respect and responsibilities derive entirely from the work accomplished for the project. On Wikipedia, the wildly successful free encyclopaedia which anyone can edit, contributors (“editors”) classify themselves according to their edit or article counts, to the type of articles or sub-projects to which they have contributed, to the accolades they have received from their peers and other statistically quantifiable criteria.

(More here.)