WikiPedia, Speech, & Freedom of Fiction

The recent roe in USA Today about Wikipedia started my thought process.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x.htm

Here are the things I'm thinking about:

How are standard encyclopedia's written?
How is wikipedia written?
What are the pros and cons of each?
I guess the bigger question in my mind is how are scholarly arcticles *really* written.
This is a big question in my mind because I have always just kind of trusted them, without giving much thought as to how they were birthed. Hence the following:


***
As I understand it the current quality control for
scholarly articles is the process of peer review.

"How is peer review normally implemented, in conventional paper journals? The journal has an Editor and an Editorial Board. With some journals it is the Editor in Chief, with others it is the Editor in consultation with the Board, or with Action Editors, who selects the referees, usually one or two per manuscript, a third or more consulted if a deadlock needs to be broken. The referees advise the Editor(s) by submitting reports (sometimes anonymous, sometimes not) evaluating the manuscript and making recommendations about acceptance/rejection and revision. The reports are advisory rather than binding on the Editor, who makes the actual decision, but a good Editor chooses his referees well and then for the most part trusts them; besides, it is only the very narrow specialty journal whose Editor has the expertise to judge all submissions on his own. The idea of peer review is also to free publication from the domination of any particular individual's preferences, making it answerable to the peer community as a whole -- within the discipline or specialty. (Interdisciplinary journals always have added problems in achieving peer consensus, and indeed, even with specialty journals, referee disagreement rates suggest that consensus is more than one can expect from peer review; nor is it clear that it would be desirable; Harnad 1985**)."

**Harnad, S. (1985) Rational disagreement in peer review. Science, Technology and Human Values 10: 55 - 62.

Who writes encyclopedia articles?

Encyclopedia Britannica says that it is written by an editorial board of "the world's greatest minds". In addition there PR material is trustworthy because: a.) they've been doing the encyclopedia thing for a long time b.) Lots of people already trust them to do the right thing c.) They let people who win prestigious awards write/edit for them**
**http://www.britannica.com/premium/

I'm not saying that I disagree with them. I just find these to be interesting reasons. It seems to me that these are not really great reasons. It seems to me that they should be talking more about their process of ferretting out facts. I mean Wikipedia fulfils all of the same requirements as the Britannica PR, with the exception of we've been doing this for a long time. The one difference that I see between the two is that Joe average like myself does not have access to the edits or the prepublication documents that Britannica uses to build its articles. With Wikipedia I can see all of that from the beginning. If WikiPedia (as an institution or a process or an organ, whatever it is) has any fault in the false information that is contained in its pages I think that it is in not having some kind of "THIS IS VERIFIED BY TRUSTED WIKIPEDIA SOURCES AS NOT LIBELOUS" flag.

Some would argue that this kind of mechanism takes the democracy out of Wikipedia, in that someone has to stamp an article with final approval before it is considered legit.

I'm still processing a lot thoughts from this WikiPedia business and would like to hear the take of others. I am all for an organ of absolute free democratic speech. By democratic I mean not overtly false. I'm willing to leave lots of room for point of view, and even for point of view to be shaded into the presentation of facts. That's fine, spin is protected speech in my view, even if I disagree with it, or don't see it as spin. Lies and intentional falsifications however have no place in my freedom of the blog/wiki/cyber press. Unless they are presented as what they are...fiction. That's a lot of rambling. My lunch hour is officially over 5 min ago, so if there's anyone left who reads this blog...Fire Away.