Clay Shirky has made a new and important contribution to the debate on the roles of experts vs. free contributors in building knowledge, as it applies to the Wikipedia vs. Citizendium controversy.
You can read it here, and it is strongly recommended. Shirky focuses on the issue of cost, i.e. costs of contributions (Wikipedia) vs. costs of contributors (Citizendium and Brittanica), as one of the key reasons that the Wikipedia is a better fit.
I would like another argument: power. If we look at knowledge production through the admittedly broad sweep of the premodern/modern/postmodern distinction, I think we can generalize the following. In the premodern hierarchical networks, one power center tends to control the knowledge (the King, the Church, the Guilds), which flows from the top down on a need to know basis. Knowledge is considered a secret to be protected. That changes with modernity, when the Frency Encyclopedists (Diderot) decide that the knowledge of the guilds should be there for everyone. Modernity is based on decentralized networks, and competing power centers. Power is devolved. To the question on how to validate knowledge, decentralized credentializing institutions are created. I would argue that power is pretty much a top down affair still, and in many ways, we enter the era of the rule of the expert. The doctor is master over our health, the teacher the master of our knowledge, the scientists decide what is true.
My overriding thesis would be that as distributed networks become dominant, and they are defined by bottom-up processes whereby hubs are voluntary, instead of a top down devolution of power to many power centers, then the whole issue of power changes as well.
As connected individuals, we are no longer dependent on the power of our doctor alone. They are many other ways to obtain information; we can consult our peers on their experience. We still need doctors, they are trained to know more, but they start becoming interpreters of the knowledge, partners to the community; in education, there are now many more ways to obtain knowledge, and we can learn/exchange with our peers. The school becomes just one of the places where we learn, and we are not dependent on it alone. So the teacher, the educational system, becomes a partner and helper of the process of learning.
To build a Wikipedia of knowledge, we no longer absolutely needed, were no longer dependent on the experts, and we just did it.
But does that mean that experts have no role? They still have important relative roles, because they are trained and more specialized. But as in the other cases, they are partners, not masters. So how can they best serve the community?
In my opinion, a dual structure might be a good solution to the Wikipedia. The free contributors would still build the knowledge, unimpeded by any censoring power of experts. The experts could have their own area, and build advice pages, pretty much in the same way as the free contributors are building theirs. In such pages, they could point out errors, provide additional material and interpretations. That way, users would have an additional option, next to the normal page, they would have this added perspective. Contributors would similarly be enriched through the access to this additional expert material. The experts would be freeer to create their own material, unemcumbered by any dumbing down process. But let’s have no illusion, the expert pages would be just as multi-perspectival and contentious as the normal pages.
In conclusion, any defense or return to the old credentialist way of doing things, are doomed to failure, because of the cost issues identified by Shirky, and because of the fundamentally different power structure, my argument above. So we need a new mental model: peers building value, constructing knowledge, working at their well-being; these are then in need of the more qualified advice of the experts, who have a new role of servant leadership.
Francois Rey comments:
“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.”