What
do we most want,
as
responsible, independent-minded researchers, out of an encyclopedia?
Primarily, I think most of us want mainstream expert opinion stated
clearly and accurately; but we don't want to ignore minority and
popular views, either, precisely because we know that experts are
sometimes wrong, even systematically wrong. We want well-agreed facts
to be stated as such, but beyond that, we want to be able to consider
the whole dialectical enchilada, so that we can make up our own minds
for ourselves. (…)
Involving
both groups in a content production system has the best chance of
faithfully representing the full spectrum of expression .To exclude
the public is to put readers at the mercy of wrongheaded intellectual
fads; and to exclude experts, or to fail to give them a special role
in an encyclopedia project, is to risk getting expert opinion wrong.
LARRY SANGER, a co-founder of Wikipedia
