You may recall last November, when former Encyclopaedia Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry heavily criticized Wikipedia in an article entitled "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia."

The article caused a good deal of controversy. Wikipedia represents the new free, open source mentality of information thriving on the Internet (the kind of mentality behind Linux; also note that I am note equating "free" with "open source"), while McHenry represents the "old guard" of closed, elitist, and expensive information. It's very much like a battle between Catholics and Lutherans: on the one hand, McHenry suggests that only a select few have the credentials to disseminate information. On the other hand, Wikipedia suggests that anyone can disseminate information, and that the Internet had made this democratization (Gr. demos, "the commons, the people" + Gr. -ize, "to conform to such a way"; from the same root comes democracy, "authority of the people") of information possible.

It certainly has. Blogs are another example of the democratization of information. Whereas journalists with credentials behind them (a degree in journalism plus a respected news organization) told us the news prior to the existence of the Internet (although fringe and "underground" publications provided news as well, but were not taken to be authoritative), bloggers have no credentials beyond a background knowledge in the material they write about and excellent research skills. In the increasingly anti-authority world of the Internet, having credentials is more of a liability than not having them. Credentials mean that you're part of the establishment, that an elite person has, like a feudal lord, given you the authority to say what is factual and what is not factual (the "t-word" will not be used here, since encyclopedias are not bastions of truth, but of fact).

The Internet seems to reject information from an authority figure merely on principle, without evaluating the information itself. The fact that it comes from an elite source renders it biased, inaccurate, or "evil" by itself. When Microsoft engineer Peter Torr criticized Mozilla Firefox for being insecure, open-source apologists rushed him immediately, declaring him "narrowminded" and "a tool." Some of his comments made me a little leery, like when he referred to download mirrors at universities being operated by "a bunch of kids at some random university I've never heard of." But did the people who read his blog entry bother to consider what he was saying? Or did they immediately presume that since he (1) worked for Microsoft, and (2) was attacking Firefox, he must be an evil person and obviously stupid.

His comments about security were on target. Firefox entices its users into thinking that (1) it is hack-proof and thus (2) it will stop any nasties (spyware, adware, malware) from entering your computer. This is not the case. Torr correctly indicts Firefox for lulling its users into insecure computing practices, like readily accepting a download from a site that you have been redirected to. "Not only does this software come from a completely random university server, but I have no way of checking if it is the authentic Firefox install or some maliciously altered copy," writes Torr. There is no security authority telling the user that the product is safe. The Internet needs security, and it has that in the form of certificates which certify that the thing you downloaded really is what it claims to be. Even Firefox utilizes certificates. And where to certificates come from? Private third-party institutions, like Verisign, certify that certificates are real. If they won't do it, then who will?

The same is true for Wikipedia. Aaron Krowne, writing for Free Software Magazine, lambasted McHenry for his criticisms of Wikipedia, suggesting that he has a "a vested interest or deep-seated bias" in his hatred for Wikipedia. But what about the integrity of the information? Who will certify that the information I find on Wikipedia is true? What are the credentials of the authors of various articles? There is no certainty beyond the theory that, if enough people review and revise an article, it will become factually correct. "Wikipedia is almost becoming authoritative," says Krowne, "a fact which clearly upsets McHenry and similarly-situated individuals." Why is it upsetting? Because they are Grinch-types who sit in their high castles, cursing the fact that the people now have a free encyclopedia? Or is it because they are concerned about the quality of the information coming from Wikipedia? McHenry isn't the only person who questions Wikipedia. Krowne acknowledges that Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger also expressed doubts about Wikipedia and suggested that become less anti-elitist and have more respect for expertise. Sanger observes that "project participants have such a horror of the traditional deference to expertise, this sort of proposal has never been taken very seriously by most Wikipedians leading the project now." Why have project participants been loathe to bring in experts? The existence of "experts" and "non-experts" runs counter to the democratization of information on the Internet, where everyone is an expert, and anyone who claims to be an expert is obviously up to no good.

There are people who know more than you do. The folks at Wikipedia must learn this. Experts have spent years studying their fields and have credentials from institutions to prove it. The people who want to make information dissemination more egalitarian are frequently (though not always) armchair scholars who can put half-information in academic-sounding language to mask its inadequacies. The people who contribute to Wikipedia are the same people that you and I have met on countless message boards. They know a little bit about enough things to be dangerous, but not enough to be experts. On the Internet, the person who sounds the most authoritative is the most authoritative, whether he is or not.

In academia, we still require that web pages have credentials behind them. Any old web page won't do; it must have an authority behind it. The Internet provides a plethora of information, but not all of that information can be certified as correct. Wikipedians object to the existence of an omniscient third party certifying information to be correct or not. The fact is that someone must exist to certify whether information is correct.

In the absence of information, Wikipedians (and bloggers) will defer to opinion as a substitute for fact. Most blogs do not provide "news," but rather provide an opinion about the news. Likewise, Wikipedia provides facts as well as opinions about those facts. For a reference source, this is unnecessary and unwanted. I can form my own opinions; I just want the background material around which to base those facts. By throwing your own opinion into those facts, you have interfered with my ability to think for myself. You would have me think as you do. That's not what I want when I go to an encyclopedia.

Democracy for democracy's sake is a terrible idea. Just because an encyclopedia can be written by people from around the world does not mean that that is a good idea. The question must be asked, "Why would I want a reference source whose facts are questionable, just for the sake of calling it 'free and open'?" This is the problem: Wikipedians put the cart of demos before the horse of fact. I don't go to an encyclopedia because it espouses opinions about information accessibility that I agree with. I go to an encyclopedia for correct information, and in the case of Wikipedia, its contributors are more concerned with the information being available for dissemination by anyone than that information being correct.

What are we really talking about? Democracy means "authority of the people," but in the case of Wikipedia, the people do not have the authority. Wikipedia is currently in a state of anarchy (Gr. an, "without" + Gr. arkhos, "leader"), or more properly, ankratia ("without authority"). The ideal of the Internet is ankratia, but only in certain ways that are rather hypocritical. It is perfectly acceptable to criticize Microsoft for being a large, nameless, faceless corporation and Windows for being a terrible operating system. But to criticize Linux or Mozilla (and there are valid reasons for criticizing them) is heresy. Microsoft is regularly criticized for not adhering to standards of HTML compliance - invented by whom? An authority: the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which creates standards for Web markup languages like HTML, XML, and XHTML. Internet anarchists are perfectly content to obey some authorities and not others, as long as the authority's politics are in line with their own.

Democratization brings freedom. This we can be sure of, as far as states go. But even in the United States, we are a federal republic. A pure democracy would be crazy with 293 million people. Instead, we invest authorities with the power to do things for us. So, too, do we invest authorities with the responsibility of finding information for us. We are not experts on ancient Persia. That's why we expect other people to be. But we want them to have the ability to say something about ancient Persia and have it be factually correct. Wikipedia denies us this. And if the Wikipedian suggests that one can never know if a fact is totally true or whether or not an authority is correct, then I will say that Encyclopaedia Britannica is more correct than Wikipedia. I hardly ever use Wikipedia to look things up; I use Project Bartleby's Columbia Encyclopedia and the other reference materials available at Bartleby. I know the material has been researched by actual, real-life scholars, not kids in dorm rooms sipping Mountain Dew. I place factual correctness above the necessity of being free and open. And if you'd like a free encyclopedia, try the Columbia Encyclopedia. As for being "open," I'd prefer a closed encyclopedia if that meant that the facts were correct.

This does not mean that Wikipedia should close its doors forever. What it does mean is exactly what Larry Sanger suggests: in order to be authoritative, it must accept authority. U.S. currency is accepted around the world only because it is based on a promise from the U.S. government that the money will be worthwhile tomorrow. A Wikipedia currency would give us no such security, since it isn't backed by anything - just as the Wikipedia encyclopedia is not backed by anything but the "full faith and credit" of its contributors and its review process, all of which are suspect. "The project can both prize and praise its most knowledgeable contributors, and permit contribution by persons with no credentials whatsoever," says Sanger. If Wikipedia wishes to survive - and if the Internet wishes to be taken seriously - then we must show some deference to authority, lest the Internet become one giant, mindless message board void of cogent thought.