It's now been over 2 years since I explained why I thought Wikipedia's editing process to be hopelessly broken, so it is with obvious satisfaction that I read this news report essentially acknowledging what I was getting at: that Wikipedia's "allow anybody to edit anything" paradigm sets the bar too low for vandals, trolls and fanatics with personal agendas, while discouraging anyone with expertise whose time is too valuable to be spent in drawn-out edit wars.
As it is, all Wikipedia's "NPOV" controls amount to is the online version of the spurious "neutrality" espoused by lazy and ignorant journalists when dealing with topics such as evolution or global warming: sensible people recognize that not everyone deserves "equal time" to air their worthless arguments, be they creationists, birthers, flat-earthers, Holocaust deniers, "race-realist" quacks or whatever flavor of lunacy may be at issue, but when it turns to an online encyclopedia suddenly all sorts of nonsensical protestations are routinely allowed to clear the issue. If granting equal TV time to Kent Hovind and Richard Dawkins severely overvalues the value of Hovind's time while drastically undervaluing Dawkins', surely the same holds true online, where the ratio of fools and liars to valuable contributors is far greater than it is on television. Whether Wikipedia's proposed new approach will do a good job of rebalancing the scales is an open question, but there is no doubting that something new is definitely needed.
PS: I've just discovered a blog entry by a certain Per Bylund which touches upon Wikipedia's problems in the context of the "Tragedy of the Commons" concept - and which uses Bylund's own personal experiences to illustrate the problem I'm getting at. Just try looking up, say, "Ordinance 50" in relation to Afrikaner history, or Korea's economic development under Japanese rule, and you'll see how obsessives with ethnocentric personal agendas and a surfeit of leisure time can succeed at bowdlerizing well-attested historical facts to their satisfaction.
PPS: I can't resist adding yet one more link, this time by an actual geoscientist explaining why contributing to Wikipedia simply makes no sense for him. If you don't grasp the essence of the problem after reading this lucid article, you probably never will.
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