The Cult of the Expert

Posted on | March 11, 2008 | No Comments

Having read both articles while I was travelling this week, I almost blogged about the same two pieces (one in Newsweek (The Revenge of the Experts), the other in the Economist (The Battle for Wikipedia’s Soul)) that George Siemens wrote about earlier today, but my draft quickly became a little grumpy, so I desisted. Having read George’s post however I decided to go ahead and express my grumpiness anyway, softened only a little (I think).

The problem for me with articles such as these is that I can’t help feeling they are creating, or acknowledging, oppositions that do not actually exist. George calls it a ‘false conflict’. The expert can only come ‘back’ if the expert has been in some sense ‘away’ (see the Newsweek article). And the so-called deletionists seem to believe that the trivial within Wikipedia somehow detracts from the serious and the worthy (see the Economist article). Why? A library, for instance, can contain the utterly trivial on its shelves alongside the deeply serious – no one, that I know of, suggests that this fact somehow detracts from the serious purpose of a library. Those who enter the library doors know what they are looking for and, usually, are able to find what they want while ignoring what they do not want. Why should the Web be any different? Should the legal deposit policy of the British (and other national) Library collections be discontinued because it necessarily means the gathering of texts that would not fit with the views of those who rail against Wikipedia at the present time?

I think that all of these aspects can co-exist happily – those who only want to view serious and worthy entries (in their terms) in Wikipedia or elsewhere can simply ignore the trivial (in their terms). Those who want to read the views of experts (in their terms) can simply ignore those members of the ignorant masses (in their terms) who also choose to write and publish to their preferred outlets.

We are not dealing with a zero sum game of any kind – the rise of one source of information does not (necessarily) cause the dissipation of another. Why then do those who espouse the ‘cult of the expert’, for want of a better term, feel it necessary not just to have access to the authoritative information (in their terms) that they seek, but to deny those who want access to the trivial access to the information they want?

It is elitism, pure and simple.

Technorati Tags: the Economist, Newsweek, george siemens, elearnspace, cult of the expert, wikipedia