Both sides of the Wikipedia debate (is it good or bad, value or trash?) are well developed by this point. But that doesn’t preclude high levels of discourse on the subject, and a wonderful conversation is happening now, with Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog as the focal point. Anderson argues that Wikipedia (and Google too, by the way) has greater probablistic value than Britannica, because even though some individual entries fall below standard, the average level of quality combined with the enormous size (ten times as many entries as Britannica) makes it more likely to have a good research experience in Wikipedia than in a peer-reviewed encyclopedia. This probabilistic viewpoint goes against our brains, he asserts, but is nonetheless a key to a new world order of information presentation.

Keying off this argument, Clifford Stoll concedes that Chris’s probabilistic theories are (probably) correct, but that doesn’t mean Wikipedia and Google are good for us. By rewarding the optimization of large-scale social intelligence, are we removing incentive to create high-quality microscopic content?