Animal_farm I'm a rebel at heart. As a rule, I distrust authority, and there are far too many examples of otherwise well-intentioned people, either individually or as groups, who get into power, and then deliver some of the worst horrors of history.  

So I wonder if we're trading the authority of one-way media for the tyranny of the crowd.

Late last month, Wikipedia banned certain IP addresses "owned and operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates" from editing the online encyclopedia. I did a little sleuthing, and discovered that it wasn't the first time a ban, whether temporary or permanent, that limited access:

  • February, 2006: Capitol Hill
  • January, 2007: The entire country of Qatar (they all share one IP address, oddly enough)
  • September, 2007: Overstock.com

Why aren't we freaked out about this?

Forget for a moment that anybody can create an entry about anybody or anything, and that it's up to the litmus test of the generic "crowd" to make sure it's accurate (and even though accuracy doesn't even begin to touch upon the what or why things are included in entries). Whether the content is right, appropriate, meaningful, or relevant doesn't even factor into the process; I know, such judgments are the domain of judges, whom we've summarily fired and executed. 

Only we haven't. We just traded them for anonymous ones. 

Who are the people who decide who qualifies for posting to Wikipedia? It's not an easy list to uncover, and all I could find were, yes, more wiki entries, none of which answered my question. What qualifies them to judge qualifications? They're just "people like you and me," and it seems that they form into a committee (or committees) that can decide when somebody (or a group) isn't fairly editing entries, and summarily ban them. Petitions can be filed, which can take many months to consider, but then rulings are final. 

This starts sounding like Robespierre's Terror, doesn't it? "Oh, we've decided your edits threaten the state of wiki, so off with your head!" The only guarantee that entries will be accurate (see above for the squishy qualities of accuracy) is that the anonymous crowd will ensure it, guided by the not-always-so-invisible hand of the anonymous committee. The crowd is inherently smart, fair, and self-correcting.

Compared to the authority is purports to replace, it's wildly capricious. We know who writes the entries to, say, Encyclopedia Britannica; we can understand the vetting they received through their education and career accomplishments, which were (or are) readily available; the members of the editorial board are public. There are conventions and processes called... gasp... standards, which are well-known, and upon which we could confer some modicum of authority. It is an imperfect system, for sure, but it's knowable, reasonably consistent and, usually, fair.

Maybe we're still living on the same farm, only working for different masters? Sometimes change isn't an improvement.