Dull thoughts in a sharp world.

In a recent article ars techica title Why Wikipedia Will Fail the author discusses challanges that Wikipedia faces as it has reached mainstream.  Here are some of the points: 

For instance, to keep the site freely editable, Wikipedia will need
to replace its stock of hardcore admins and editors as they retire or
quit. But Goldman thinks this will be a problem, since many of these
editors first started their work when Wikipedia was a quite different
place. Now, the editors themselves discourage the contributions of
others through “xenophobia” toward outsiders; Goldman believes that
they see “threats” everywhere and points out that the greater part of
all edits made to the site are actually reverted by these editors.

In addition, plenty of political jockeying takes place among
editors. And editors have few incentives for their work—no way to make
money, no real way even to earn attribution. Together, these problems
mean that as editors get burned out by patrolling for spam and
vandalism, fewer new people will be interested in stepping up to plug
the gap.

The result: a death spiral among the editorial community.

Wikipedia could also move in the other direction, making it more
difficult to edit (at least some) articles on the site. Jimbo Wales has
been a big backer of moving to “flagged revisions,”
for instance, and the site already has limited features to “protect”
controversial articles. But this is also tricky, because it will raise
the bar for both spammers and for new members. This discourages new
contributors to Wikipedia and also makes it more likely that current
site editors will cease their voluntary labor—some will decide that
“this isn’t what we signed up for” when they started work on the
crowdsourced project.

Though I see some validity in the points, and I agree with the challenges it faces as the incentives to participate do not have compounding affects.  Similar to Yelp, no one wants to be the 524th, but they want to be the first.  However, I do not agree that the openness:

1)  Is a detriment to the quality of the content.  Yes, there will be specific examples of inaccurate information, but as a whole, it profives a massive volume of information.  Even large history books, science books, etc written by professionals have errors.  

2)  Cannot be a combination of crowdsourced project and professionals.  With the transparency of the internet, it would not be diffciult to find deemed “experts” in the field to provide some validity to versions of a article.  A tag verifying that the article’s accuracy on that particular version by a professional would ensure that they article has some truth, instead of rallying on the masses or the original author to agree. 

I think the semi-protected status solves many of the spam and flamers concerns, though it does reduce the amount of contributions.  But we’re talking about accuracy on already created articles and Wikipedia can still have open articles for the new topics. 

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