The expertise problem.

English Wikipedia is allegedly anti-expert. This fails to explain why you can hardly move on the wiki without bumping into someone with multiple degrees, or how it got tagged "unemployed Ph. D. deathmatch."

I submit that English Wikipedia does not have a bias against experts (although there are editors who clearly do), but that massive collaboration is hard. The main problem is how to work with idiots you can’t get rid of, who consider you an idiot they can’t get rid of. "Assume good faith" is not a platitude, it's a warning that someone really can be that clueless and that sincere idiocy is ten times as hard to deal with as knowing trolling; it's a nicer way of phrasing "don't assume malice where stupidity will suffice." Summary of the summary: people remain the problem.

Academia has evolved mechanisms to deal with antisocial idiots (throw them out) and antisocial experts (put them to work in a locked room and keep them away from humans); wikis are still working on the problem. Antisocial experts on a wiki — unquestionably expert, unquestionably unable to collaborate on a wiki — are really special. Thankfully they're usually too weird to then go blogging about it ...

How do other wikis cope with this? Other Wikipedias? Citizendium doesn't seem to have had this yet that I know of, but that could just be early days. Ideas?

Edit: See also this post on my Wikimedia blog, with some comments from people who've been sucked deeper into the thing.

Love u more.

• "We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area."

No B-Movie for me tonight, as, despite staying home again due to iffy balance, (c) I'm just a bit buggered (b) I still have a blocked left ear and everything is just not right but mostly (a) I have a sleepy little girl curled up on me who would probably be yelling her head off if I weren't here. So she wins an evening with me. It also gives her mother a chance to exhale.

It's been a laudanum day. (The sort where you wish the stuff was still in vogue as a pacifier.) Thank fuck for Infacol. Freda just drifted off to an MP3 of Peter Murphy and Trent Reznor doing "Warm Leatherette." Pete sounds really silly. Not normal (though Normal) lullabye fare, but IF IT WORKS THEN I DON'T CARE. Third Eye also — 120bpm disco is simple, repetitive and I can dance her back and forth to it.

We have on occasion been giving in and showing her television, in the form of videos on YouTube. No way am I letting her near a real telly after seeing the way her eyes lock to the screen and her face goes slack. Drug of the nation!