] Of course librarians, teachers, and academics don't
] like the Wikipedia. It works without privilege, which is
] inimical to the way those professions operate.
]
] This is not some easily fixed cosmetic flaw, it is the
] Wikipedia's driving force. You can see the reactionary
] core of the academy playing out in the horror around
] Google digitizing books held at Harvard and the Library
] of Congress the NY Times published a number of
] letters by people insisting that real scholarship would
] still only be possible when done in real libraries.

Shirky's response is entertaining and well written and completely misses the point. There is an argument between internet people and people who like the way books smell about how to build information resources. There is a completely different discussion that says, we like wikipedia and believe in this model, but we acknowledge that its not perfected. How do you make wikipedia more useful then it is. Its more useful if I don't have to worry about the information being edited by a troll right before I check it. It would be more useful if the data in the articles was referenced. To discuss how to make it more useful is not to say it isn't useful now or that the internet and openness are bad. The thing has flaws and we ought to work on addressing them. If we're not willing to think critically about things that we are building that have become popular simply because we're afraid of conceding a point to the "other guys" everything we build is going to fail.