James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds, begins with Francis Galton's anecdote about an ox-weighing contest at a country fair: for a half-shilling, one could purchase a ticket on which to write an estimate of the slaughtered and dressed weight of a displayed living ox. The ticket with the guess closest to the actual weight would win a prize. Galton found that the mean of all guesses was in fact more accurate than the best guess, even though the guessers included livestock experts. This is a good illustration of the fact that a collective judgment may often be more correct than the judgment of any individual expert — something which appears to be true in financial markets, for example.
Wikipedia is a mechanism for producing collective judgments about the accuracy and importance of factual statements. I think this makes Wikipedia very exciting — any statement placed in Wikipedia is immediately subject to review and revision, and if everyone is animated by the same sense of trying to achieve truth, the text can quite rapidly evolve to something accurate and balanced.
I began my time on Wikipedia feeling important. I soon discovered that I don't matter. Wikipedia will get on just fine without my contribution. In a funny way that is reassuring--the world is moving on as it must, and one can just chill. That might be the best advice for an editor: chill. Be like Mr. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice.
WP editors are by and large excellent people, but I wish that they had a better appreciation of just how valuable academic social science can be when it dares to defend unpopular views. Academics tend to be a cautious and comfortable tribe, willing to write papers that buttress the conventional wisdom, whatever that might be. As William James said, they are not really thinking, they are just rearranging their prejudices. That's what makes the few advocates of unpopular views so valuable--without them, there would be nothing to argue against, and there would be no development of social science.
I'm thinking of people like the historian Justin McCarthy, whose research in the Ottoman archives finds that Armenians killed about as many Muslims as Muslims killed Armenians; I'm thinking about the psychologist Richard Lynn and the philosopher Michael Levin, who dare to write about heritable interracial differences; I'm thinking about the psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, whose research on early childhood memories provides some support for the existence of reincarnation. Yes, their work is "controversial", and "widely criticized", but that is exactly why it is so valuable--it provides the foil against which others can argue, so that the truth can eventually emerge. Unfortunately, many WP editors seem to think that if work is "controversial", or "widely criticized", then it must be either ridiculous or evil. Article categories like "Armenian Genocide deniers" (applied to McCarthy), or "pseudoscience" or "fringe science" (applied to everything from cold fusion to reincarnation research), reflect an unsophisticated view of science, a view more appropriate to religion, where orthodox views are championed, and heretical views opposed.
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