Slate magazine has a piece up about Wikipedia, with the salacious subtitle “Digg, Wikipedia and the Myth of Web 2.0 Democracy” — a column that says it was written by editorial intern Chris Wilson, but might as well have been written by Andrew “I Hate The Internet” Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur and a man who never met a Web 2.0 service he couldn’t first misrepresent and then eviscerate. Chris puts his thesis in the lede:

“While Wikipedia does show the creative potential of online communities,” he writes, “it’s a mistake to assume the site owes its success to the wisdom of the online crowd.”

Why is it a mistake? Because, he says, the site has a small group of editors (gasp!) who control things, it uses “bots” to ensure that things look right, and most of the articles were written by 1 per cent of the site’s users, according to a widely-reported study. This is a little like complaining that airlines hoodwink us into thinking we can fly, when the truth is that it’s the airplane and the pilots that are doing the flying.

The existence of a so-called “power law” distribution or “long tail” effect in social relationships is older than I am (and that’s pretty old). As one commenter points out in Slate’s forum on the article, it’s hardly surprising that only a small group of people have the time, knowledge or resources to write in-depth articles for Wikipedia. Has the site ever said that all users contribute equally? Not as far as I know.

“Despite the fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0, direct democracy isn’t feasible at the scale on which these sites operate.”

Wilson also throws Digg into the mix, and hints that there are dark rumours about the existence of editors (gasp!) at the supposedly crowd-controlled service. Of course, Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson have said several times that there are editors who can block people or remove links, but it’s much more fun to imagine some kind of conspiracy a la The Da Vinci Code, with albino monks killing people and whatnot.

In fact, as another commenter on the Slate piece notes, the study Wilson quotes from shows that the number of users who contribute small changes to Wikipedia has been increasing for the past several years, and now outweighs the elite group. And he also notes that while 1 per cent of the users sounds like a small number, that’s still about 65,000 people. And yet, Wilson persists in referring to Wikipedia as an “oligarchy.” Nice job with that straw man, Chris — you totally kicked his ass.

It’s not really ironic — unless you use the broad Alanis Morrissette definition of that word — but it’s at least an interesting coincidence that just a day or two after Nick Carr lamented the fact that the Web is powered by numbskulls, someone would write what I think is an excellent overview of why the Wikipedia approach to synthesizing knowledge is a worthwhile one to pursue, despite the potential for being overrun by Mr. Carr’s numbskulls. And it’s an even more interesting coincidence that the writer in question happens to work for the same newspaper I do, the Globe and Mail.

I don’t like to write about the Globe here on my personal blog, because it’s inevitably going to be seen as navel-gazing and/or pimping for the boss, but I do make exceptions — especially when it’s about Web 2.0 and social media and that sort of thing. In this case, I think the paper’s recent editorial on the topic of Wikipedia was damn good, and I would have linked to it if someone else wrote it, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t just because it appeared in the Globe.

What’s even more impressive is that it comes from the editorial board, which many see (rightly or wrongly) as the last bastion of conservative (small “c”) thought about such newfangled gizmos as the Internet, Web 2.0, wikis and so forth. And yes, I realize that it’s also somewhat ironic that the editorial I’m linking to is behind the pay wall, but hey — everyone is trying to find their way in this new media world, and different models are being experimented with, for better or worse. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Here’s a taste of what the editorial says:

A camel is a horse designed by a committee. That old saw nicely expresses the skepticism most of us feel about collaborative thinking. We have far more respect for the individual genius — Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein — who thinks great thoughts in splendid isolation. But the rise of the Internet and the brainstorming it enables should make us rethink that old prejudice. “Are many minds better than a few?” suggested a recent headline in the Economist. Quite possibly, yes.

It goes on to give a capsule history of the Wikipedia, and what it attempts to do, as well as some of the controversies that have arisen, including the Siegenthaler affair. And then it states:

The Wikipedia model is not perfect, but its success has implications that go far beyond how people conduct research. It puts a question mark over the whole idea that information must move from credentialed producer to passive consumer. That presents established companies and organizations with a big challenge.

That is the point, in a nutshell — a point that the Globe’s editorial writers link more or less explicitly to the concept of democracy itself, just as I did in a response to Seth Finkelstein on my recent “numbskulls” post (see below). As Winston Churchill once said, democracy is the worst form of government — except, of course, for all the others.