The recent scandal involving a Wikipedia editor’s falsified credentials has laid bare the hypocrisy of the open-information movement’s disdain for academic authority. It turns out that the disgraced “Essjay” repeatedly invoked his fictitious doctoral degrees in theology and canon law to settle disputes in his favor, a remarkable achievement in a forum where credentials ostensibly do not matter.
These fake credentials also served to improve the project’s standing in the media. In the now infamous New Yorker article, Essjay had been cited as an example of an academic expert willing to devote extended time and effort to the “free encyclopedia,” breaking the stereotype of the anti-authoritarian adolescent or young adult with too much free time. The revelation that Wikipedia’s most notable expert contributor is in fact a 24-year-old community college dropout with too much free time only reinforces the stereotype that most of its editors are homebound young white males, explaining its inordinate emphasis on pop culture and computer science.
In this demographic sector, anti-authoritarianism dies hard (it is usually cured by age, maturity, and life experience), so many of Essjay’s fellow Wikiphiles have taken care to emphasize that he was an excellent contributor, proving that academic credentials are worthless. In fact, all that is proved is that very little expertise is needed to produce mediocre content, especially when most of it is copied from other sources. The quality content on Catholic topics came not from Essjay (who had a shallow understanding of most complex issues, regurgitating popular liberal theology), but from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia. The fact that someone as ignorant as Essjay (see his wrongheaded imprimatur comment) could pose as an “expert on Catholicism” (as he laughably styled himself, while admitting to be a non-Catholic – strange vocation!) only reveals the level of illiteracy of the average editor. This ignorance can be seen throughout the Wikipedia, especially in areas like philosophy, history and theology, where a writer needs to be more than a compiler of facts.
The information iconoclasts claim to judge people not on credentials, but on their expertise as proven by their ability to back up their edits. In the world of amateur encyclopedists, backing up a claim means linking to an online source that repeats the claim. This practice is a poor substitute for expertise, since just because something isn’t on Google doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In 2007, the vast majority of human knowledge is still offline, including most scholarly sources published before 1995. Those journals which are online are usually available only through secure access, and will not be accessible by linking from a search engine. Thus the expert who appeals to any offline source of knowledge will be at a disadvantage in a dispute with an amateur who can back up his claim with a link to an online newspaper.
In the final analysis, all content disputes appeal to authority, not the authority of the editors themselves, but that of the references they cite. It will not suffice to compose one’s own argument, since “original research” is prohibited, but one must appeal to the authority of journalists and academics, the same people whose authority is disdained in the editing process. This appeal to “reliable sources” (and how can an amateur determine which sources are more reliable?) is a tacit admission that credentials are a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the construction of a credible article. Authority cannot be derived from its opposite, but from other authorities who proved their expertise through the rigors of education and experience, and being subjected to expert peer review, for it is the expertise of the reviewers that makes peer review a potent indicator of credibility. While it is easy to find numerous examples of bias or incompetence among experts, this is not a rational basis for rejecting the entire class in favor of amateurs who are completely dependent on the expert class for information, but lack the experience and judgment to discern the strengths and weaknesses of these authorities.