Francois Rey sent us the following comment, as reaction on our own comments on the Wikipedia/Citizendium experts debate:

“I have not fully delved into this problem of experts vs. credentials. I can understand the differing points of view but I cannot say whether Citizendium will succeed or fail. In fact I wonder if this discussion on expertise and credentials is what matters most. What comes to me reading these various discussions is the following: we’re spending a lot of time talking about people’s attributes (expertise and credentials) and not so much about the attributes of the knowledge itself. In other words it sounds like we’re putting too much focus on the author and not enough on the content itself. The attribute ‘authors’ is only a multi-valued attribute among many other possible attribute such as ‘degree of acceptance’, number and links to ‘alternate views’, ‘editing activity’ (stable, highly active, moderate, etc.), congruence with other stories, etc. While it is important to know the source of knowledge, I believe the real test is whether knowledge becomes congruent, useful, verified, and generally accepted among peers.

The real subject of discussion in my opinion is this one: why should we give space to one and only one version of a story? In wikipedia the only way to account for multiple stories or points of view is to actually put them all into one article. While there may be a generally accepted story, or an expert story, where do we give visible space to any new story regardless of its source? What matters most, the source of the story or what it says and how it is accepted by peers? Aren’t wikipedia and citizendium going to have the same list of entries but different stories under them? Do we need different web resources for both or can we imagine a single platform that provides in its architecture the ability to have multiple stories per entries?

I believe we’re still too much under the influence of the “pensée unique”, something we had to accept in the past because of limitations in our abilities to deal with more. These limitations made it hard for many alternatives to coexist, so we took the habit of combining the high visibility of people and the production of shared objects of attention. But now that we have networked computers and P2P technologies, can’t we really free ourselves from our old habits of looking through only one pair of glasses? What the P2P approach gives us is the ability to focus more on the object at hand and less on the people behind them. Nowadays anyone can become a (co-)producer of information, knowledge, culture, and wisdom. If we keep the habit of focusing on the authors then we end up reproducing the credentials system we find in the physical world, and we tend to adopt a winner-takes-all approach, a kind of star-academia (a pun on star-academy:) where the winner has the right to write the story. While it may be useful to have track records of authorship, the relationship between information and author should no longer prevail like it used to. What matters most are what the stories say and making sure they are not exclusive of others.”