Why Wikipedia works, and how the Britannica bully got it wrong

Robert McHenry is the former Editor in Chief of the Encylopaedia Britannica who gained notoriety when he wrote a self-service, virulent attack on Wikipedia called "the faith-based encyclopedia." McHenry's claims were ludicrous, pejorative and childish, but they captured the imagination of a lot of people who were drawn to believe that if the EiC said that Wikipedia didn't work, it must be true, even if Wikipedia did, in fact, work.

Now Aaron Krowne has written a stunning refutation of McHenry's piece and published it in Free Software Magazine. This thoroughgoing debunking not only shows how shoddy McHenry's reasoning is, but it actually goes some way toward a general theory of why and how Wikipedia-like projects fail or thrive. Best article I've read all week.

The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him...

What would McHenry’s metaphor apply more fittingly to?

Why, a traditional print encyclopedia, of course. If I wanted to analyze an arbitrary Britannica article’s evolution over time (for example), I’d have to somehow acquire the entire back catalog of the Britannica (assuming older editions can even be purchased), presumably reserve a sizeable warehouse to store them all, and block out a few days or so of my time to manually make the comparison.

Even the electronic forms of traditional encyclopedias are sure to be lacking such reviewability features. This makes sense, as public reviewability would be embarrassing to traditional content creators.

Link (via /.)