EDMONTON (CUP) -- In response to admittedly deserved criticism regarding quality and reliability, the Wikimedia Foundation has announced that it will be launching Citizendium -- a new branch of Wikipedia that will be expert-written as opposed to the current free-for-all format.

At this point, it seems almost too obvious to wax philosophic on the merits of Wikipedia, but the infamous online resource is only five years old -- a testament to the blinding speed at which the world of information technology changes.

However, although it may be unreliable in some cases, Wikipedia is still extremely accurate -- and, in a sense, expertly written as well.

There are two main concepts that explain how and why Wikipedia works the way it does: the first is the “Delphi Effect,” whereby, in the words of computer-culture theorist Eric Raymond, “the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than the opinion of a single randomly chosen one of the observers.”

As proof of this, a recent study by the science journal Nature found that, comparing similar scientific articles in Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica side-by-side, each resource had the same average amount of errors per article -- and in that sense, that the two were equal in reliability.

The other basic tenet of Wikipedia -- and the reason why it vastly outperforms all other reference sources in terms of breadth, growth, and accuracy -- is that of open-source development, a movement that has its origins in the early days of computer hacking.

Humans have long dreamed of amassing all the world's knowledge, from the library of Alexandria to the French Encyclopédie. But no amount of gens des letters will be able to accomplish this feat; it's only with a massive, vibrant, and adaptive effort from damn near everyone that we can even come close. To take away this maximal number of users and reduce it to a few handpicked experts will therefore only grind Wikipedia's currently steady informational march to a halt.

Apart from over-anxious developers, then, the potentially fatal flaw of Wikipedia is not a lack of accuracy; rather, it's the relative ease with which the site can be abused, tampered with, and otherwise vandalized.

After all, if anyone with an Internet connection and a bit of online know-how can edit it, then even if only one per cent of all users were malicious, that would still be 10,000 vandals out of one million users.

Looking for some technical specifications or mathematical formulae? Wikipedia would be a great place to start. Writing a paper on U.S. foreign policy or stem-cell research? Well, you'd best steer clear of the Internet in general.

But Citizendium won't be an adequate replacement. Although an expert-written site seems -- on the surface -- to be more scholarly and reliable, such a service would merely be caught between the traditional, tight-knit encyclopedia form and its sprawling online counterpart.

As nearly every post-secondary instructor will tell you, Wikipedia ought not to be used as one's sole academic reference anyway. It's difficult to believe that this consensus will be quick to change even if this cleaner, more sterile version is introduced.

The solution, then, is not to abandon Wikipedia's open-edit format, but to improve its security. The user-account system is a good start (though it's still pretty soft), and the various disclaimers and lock-downs are actually quite effective.

Add in a few more measures to detect the identity of the digital Neanderthals and ne'er-do-wells out there, and Wikipedia can be a brilliant, reliable and all-encompassing resource for years to come.

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