A Slate interview with Larry Sanger (July 26, 2010).
A portion of Slate's introduction to the interview:
There is . . . a great deal of argument—and consternation—about the accuracy of Wikipedia entries. (A headline in the Onion made the point nicely: "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence.") That's why I went looking for Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales, then quit the project over disputes about its governance and the quality and credibility of its content.
An excerpt about Wikipedia contributors [this is Sanger speaking]:
Wikipedia has very few practical constraints about people behaving according to normal rules of politeness and fair dealing. They've got a zillion rules, of course—that's part of the problem—but there is no easy way to rein in the bad actors. And unfortunately the bad tend to drive out the good. A lot of the more sane, sensible people out there are just can't take too much of it.
An excerpt about the role of experts:
Slate: Why did you feel so strongly about involving experts?
Sanger: Because of the complete disregard for expert opinion among a group of amateurs working on a subject, and in particular because of their tendency to openly express contempt for experts. There was this attitude that experts should be disqualified [from participating] by the very fact that they had published on the subject—that because they had published, they were therefore biased. That frustrated me very much, to see that happening over and over again: experts essentially being driven away by people who didn't have any respect for those who make it their lives' work to know things.
Slate: Where do you think that contempt for expertise comes from? It's seems odd to be committed to a project that's all about sharing knowledge, yet dismiss those who've worked so hard to acquire it.
Sanger: There's a whole worldview that's shared by many programmers—although not all of them, of course—and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as "epistemic egalitarianism." They're greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else. They feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content [of a claim] itself, not its source.
Slate: It seems to me that this conflict between amateurs and experts boils down to a conflict between egalitarianism and credibility. You gestured toward this conflict in an essay on the Edge.com, where you wrote, "It's Truth versus Equality, and as much as I love Equality, if it comes down to choosing, I'm on the side of Truth."
Larry Sanger's homepage
