[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is an encyclopedia

Tue Mar 8 20:09:39 UTC 2005

Jimbo wrote

> I do not endorse the view, a view held as far as I know only by a very
> tiny minority, that Wikipedia is anti-elitist or anti-expert in any
> way.  If anything, we are *extremely* elitist but anti-credentialist.
> That is, we seek thoughtful intelligent people willing to do the very
> hard work of getting it right, and we don't accept anything less than
> that.  PhDs are valuable evidence of that, and attracting and
> retraining academic specialists is a valid goal.

I think Jimbo perhaps meant 'retaining', though in my case 'retraining'
rings a bell, also.

Certainly 'anti-elitist' would be a gross over-simplification of WP's social
processes - as would most other descriptions.  It is more to the point, I
think, to say that those who might want to argue 'from authority' on a given
issue may have to find some workaround.

Charles