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.

Having been a columnist in a former life — before I discovered the joys of having my faults pointed out to me within minutes by blog readers — I’m aware of how easy it is to get on a roll when writing about a particular topic, to the point where perhaps the rhetoric gets away from you and the facts take a back seat. Today’s object lesson: Frank Rich, a columnist with the New York Times, who wrote an op-ed piece for the paper (which unfortunately is now behind the TimeSelect pay wall) about a famous photo of a group of people watching the towers fall on September 11, 2001.

In the column, Rich wrote that the picture was “shocking” because it showed that right after the attacks, callous New Yorkers had already moved on. As he put it:

This is a country that likes to move on, and fast. The young people in Mr. Hoepker’s photo aren’t necessarily callous. They’re just American. In the five years since the attacks, the ability of Americans to dust themselves off and keep going explains both what’s gone right and what’s gone wrong on our path to the divided and dispirited state the nation finds itself in today.

Okay, so here’s one of my favourite things about the Internet in action: David Plotz wrote a critical piece for Slate magazine, saying Rich was jumping to conclusions about what the people in the photo were or were not thinking about the attacks. At the end of it, he asked anyone who was in the photo to write in and describe what was happening — and someone did. Walter Sipser wrote in and said that he and his girlfriend were in the shot, and that they (like everyone else that day) were in shock. And he adds:

A more honest conclusion might start by acknowledging just how easily a photograph can be manipulated, especially in the advancement of one’s own biases or in the service of one’s own career.

Well said. Too bad the truth had to barge in and interrupt that great flight of rhetorical fancy you had going there, Frank.

Lots of chatter in the blogosphere about whether blogs are dead, whether blogs can ever achieve anything, whether blogs will mean the death of civilization as we know it, whether my blog can beat up your blog, and so on – all of which was sparked by this article in Slate magazine.

The point of the piece seems to be that blogs as a business, in terms of making money and being acquired, is over. Fair enough. As many have pointed out, however – including my friends Tris Hussey, Mark Evans and Rob Hyndman, as well as Steve Borsch, Dan Gillmor and Steve Rubel – there is a lot more going on than Slate seems to think. Whether it’s “monetizable” or not (and how) remains to be seen.

I find it interesting that only a couple of people, including Rob, Paul Kedrosky and Munir at Blogging Journalist have mentioned an even more in-depth look at how blogs aren’t all they’ve been cracked up to be, which appeared in the Financial Times (written by Trevor Butterworth, who as Paul points out has a name that is almost too British to be believed), under the headline “Time for the last post.” In it, he quotes Choire Sicha (ex of Gawker and now at the New York Observer) as saying blogs are essentially a waste of time and accomplish little.

“The word blogosphere has no meaning,” he said from across a folding table vast enough to support the battle of Waterloo in miniature (the apartment owes much to eBay, the Ikea of bohemia). “There is no sphere; these people aren’t connected; they don’t have anything to do with each other.” The democratic promise of blogs, he explained, has just produced more fragmentation and segregation at a time when seeing the totality of things – the purview of old media – is arguably much more important.”

It’s fine to say – as the article does – that blogs aren’t a revolution, won’t kill the “dinosaurs” of old media, and other lame truisms. But Sicha’s point is a different one: that blogs are bad because they fragment things, that they aren’t connected the way they pretend to be, and that old media needs to be there to “see the totality of things.” As tied to the early success of Gawker as he might have been, this shows that Sicha never really got it to begin with. Do there need to be aggregators or filters or sources that coalesce some of the fragmentation that democracy brings? Yes. Does that have to be “old media?” No. Sicha and others are short-changing themselves and others with their narrow-minded views.

Michael Kinsley — who gave up a prestigious print job to run Slate.com magazine way back during the first Internet bubble and has since gone back to the print world — has a nice column in Slate and the Washington Post. about the death of newspapers, entitled “Black, White and Dead All Over.”

The piece — which Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine calls “cute” (although I’m not sure that’s a compliment) — does a nice job of describing how absurd the newspaper business seems now, cutting down trees and mashing them into pulp and printing stuff on them, then shipping them to people’s doorsteps in little plastic bags, all so they can throw 80 per cent of it in the garbage.

Kinsley’s essay is a little short on solutions, although he does mention that newspapers “have got the content.” Jeff does a better job of putting his finger on the light at the end of the tunnel in his post, in which he points out that newspapers have a chance to remain relevant provided they realize that “this is about control, about finding, packaging, editing, judging sources on our own.”

It’s interesting to note that while newspaper readership is declining, online news readership continues to grow. It still isn’t making up for the decline, however, and online readers still aren’t worth as much as print readers, but they are growing. And newspapers had better get them while they’re young.

Update:

My friend Stuart asked me whether I thought newspapers are dying, and here’s what I told him: I don’t think newspapers are dying, any more than radio is dead. That said, however, radio isn’t exactly a thriving medium, and neither are newspapers. I think the Internet has just increased the pressures that were already weighing on the newspaper business from television and other factors competing for people’s attention — and in a way I think the Internet offers a way out of the cul-de-sac papers are in.

I think there will always be people who read the newspaper, and want to read the newspaper — but there are likely to be fewer of them (just as there are fewer people who sit and listen to the radio every chance they get). But if anything there’s an even greater appetite for information and relevance and context, and that’s what journalism is designed to provide. Whether it’s done in paper or on the Internet isn’t really the point, it seems to me. But if newspapers don’t get doing it, then someone else will. And I think that’s Jeff’s point as well.