Danah has some great thoughts about wikis. Her post is a response to Clay Shirky’s K5 Article on Wikipedia Anti-elitism which, in turn, is a response to Larry Sanger’s Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism. She and Larry articulate many of the reasons that I have been resistant to wikis since the beginning. Their posts also touch on a lot of things that have been floating around in my head of late so this post will likely meander a bit. As the title of this post makes clear, these thoughts will out me for the elitist that I am, though perhaps not an elitist of the worst sort.

First off, I have to say that I see the value in wikis. If nothing else, their democratic ideals are noble and social software is clearly a good way to go when trying to assemble and cull a large set of information. That said, for the most part I have gotten little use out of wikis except when the base of contributors was restricted to people who already had some credibility to me. I’m all for democratic approaches to information and knowledge but I am also a firm believer in interaction design and information architecture. I’m a socioligist and an engineer therefore it isn’t surprising to hear me champeoning social software. But there are many ways to build a social information system. Rating and recommender systems like Epinions.com and Amazon are one (more on that below). Wikis are another. In mot cases, my experience has been that wikis often reproduce the chaos and uncertainty of information on the internet generally. I can never find anything and, more importantly, I have no idea if the things I do find are reliable. Why is this particular version of the article here? Who wrote it? Will it be “corrected” or changed in five minutes?

This desire for reliability is probably the root cause of my elitism. A few years studying sociology and philosphy of science has only served to cement the perspective. The fact is, in most situations, some people’s perspectives are more right than others. We can debate this objectively but it is irrefutable subjectively. I don’t care how much someone has embraced the postmodern perspective, they still believe this. Otherwise, they wouldn’t spend so much time bashing positivism as wrong or claiming that peace is the answer, etc. If there’s no hope for finding truth why do people, especially scholars, even get out of bed in the morning—other than to establish their on critical superiority. But then, of course, it can’t even be true that they are superior.

The fact is people believe that they know things about the world. We believe we know things and even believe that they are true in a generalizable sense. My research on epistemology as well as anyone’s everyday experience supports this. Relativism is a nice abstract, academic mind game but noone actually lives their lives believing that everyone’s claim to truth is equally valid, nor should they. (More on Relativism below.)

So, once we realize that there are many claims to truth AND that some are better than others, the key is to make sure that any claims to knowledge are vetted through an explicit process. There are many such processes. One example is the labor-intensive democratic process in which everyone has a say and truth is decided in an explicitly social and political way. (Science and knowledge are always social and political; making this explicit merely helps to avoid some measure of unfairness.) Another example is the relatively efficient process of establishing trusted, expert sources. Both have their places.

While I agree that some—perhaps many—librarians and academics are against wikis because of the threat to their privilege as gatekeepers of knowledge, I think many more of them cringe because they are well aware of the need for explicit, controlled processes for vetting knowledge. As Danah points out, defining concepts and terms is hard. You have to have respect for the people who do it and do it well. It is not something that everyone can do. If it was, there would be little need for dictionaries and encyclopedias because everyone would have worked these things out for themselves.

Getting back to Relativism, aside from a lack of support in our lived experience, it also has seriously negative implications for design. From a human-centered designer’s perspective, my major problem with the Relativism that comes from most strong postmodern stances is that individuals are tasked with ALL the responsibility for information gathering and interpretation (afterall, their subjectivity is the only truth as far as they are concerned). Centralized systems with any measure of control are implicitly untrustworthy. Taken to an extreme (though not an entirely unjustified one), this makes any attempt to create an information or knowledge system pointless at best and oppressive at worst.

So what is my take away message? Should we be tossing the wikis of the world and intensifying our support for good ol’ fashioned credentialed experts? Like a good academic I’ll say yes and no. We have clear evidence that too much power in the hands of an elite can be extremely dangerous. However, the majority of us believe that knowledge is not merely a matter rhetorical consensus. Some people really do have expertise and we should take advantage of it. Perhaps the wiki model as it stands now is not the right way to address this. Personally, I think something along the lines of a rating, reputation and recommender system offers more promise. I’ll end with a very brief example.

I use to work at Epinions.com. One premise behind that site was the idea that “everyone is an expert in something.” While I believe this is generally true, it quickly becomes apparent that there is a closely related corollary that is equally important: “nobody is an expert in everything.” For that reason, Epinions spent a lot of time coming up with systems for rating content and content providers. This meant that anyone could post (openness) but everything and everyone was rated by the community (vetting process). In my view, if you want democracy, this is better than a committee deciding when it is in the community’s best interest to “close down” the openness but still allows for experts to establish credibility for themselves.