{"id":536,"date":"2006-09-20T17:24:59","date_gmt":"2006-09-20T23:24:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=536"},"modified":"2006-09-20T17:24:59","modified_gmt":"2006-09-20T23:24:59","slug":"an_expertfocuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=536","title":{"rendered":"What will kill Citizendium"},"content":{"rendered":"

“An expert-focused Wikipedia,” writes<\/a> Cory Doctorow, in reference to Larry Sanger’s proposed Citizendium<\/a>, “would likely devolve into interminable pissing matches over who was and was not qualified to be called an expert, because expertise isn’t a measurable quantity, but rather something that is socially constructed.” What Doctorow is predicting in the first half of that sentence – without actually saying it – is that Citizendium will turn into Wikipedia. Wikipedia is nothing if not a forum for interminable pissing matches, over everything from the qualifications of contributors to the worthiness of subjects to the meaning of vandalism, among people with remarkably capacious bladders. As Angela Beesley, a Wikipedian steward and board member, recently said<\/a>, “Creating fewer articles as time goes on seems fairly common as people get caught up in the politics and discussion rather than the editing.” Wikipedia today has more layers<\/a> of bureaucracy than the average Fortune 500 company and more factions<\/a> than the Italian parliament.<\/p>\n

But it’s the second half of the sentence that delivers the payload: “expertise isn’t a measurable quantity, but rather something that is socially constructed.” I love the offhandedness of that, as if Doctorow were simply repeating a universally acknowledged truth. Expertise? It doesn’t really exist. It’s just something we imagine together, a vaporous communal conjuring that can shift its shape with opinion’s wind. Expertise is no more solid than celebrity.<\/p>\n

Doctorow here is glossing Clay Shirky’s recent critique<\/a> of the idea of Citizendium (it doesn’t actually exist yet), in which he labeled as “false” the belief that “experts are a special category of people, who can be readily recognized within their domains of expertise.” Continues Shirky, “experts are social facts – society typically recognizes experts through some process of credentialling, such as the granting of degrees, professional certifications, or institutional engagement. We have a sense of what it means that someone is a doctor, a judge, an architect, or a priest, but these facts are only facts because we agree they are.”<\/p>\n

This is top-shelf guff, which reveals, as if we needed to be reminded, that intellectuals make the very best anti-intellectuals. An architect does not achieve expertise through some arbitrary social process of “credentialling.” He gains expertise through a program of study and apprenticeship in which he masters an array of facts and techniques drawn from such domains as mathematics, physics, and engineering. If you doubt that, grab someone off the street and have him design a skyscraper. The same goes for a doctor, an electrician, a jet pilot, a software engineer, a zoologist, a scholar of romantic poetry, or a manicurist. The degree or certification is no more the essence of expertise than a wedding ring is the essence of love. The degree or certification is a trivial adornment. The expertise is what’s real – it’s what abides – and to call it socially constructed is not only to denigrate the expert but to denigrate the very basis of culture.<\/p>\n

I tend to agree with Shirky’s belief that Sanger’s concept of Citizendium is fatally flawed (though I wholeheartedly support Sanger’s desire to counter the destructive force of anonymity). But Shirky’s diagnosis of the flaw is all wrong. What “will kill Citizendium,” he writes, is that, unlike Wikipedia, “it won’t go far enough” in “its disrespect of experts.” No, Citizendium’s flaw does not lie in having too much faith in what Shirky dismissively calls “the rugged condition of expertise.” Its flaw lies in not having enough faith in it. By creating a vague bureaucratic system in which experts gain their Citizendium credentials through community certification, Sanger is, in fact, reducing expertise to a social construct and thus rendering it meaningless, or at least turning it into a bone of endless and silly contention. He wants to have it both ways, and as a result will likely do no better than create another Wikipedia: a vast, labyrinthine garden of mediocrity.<\/p>\n

Relativists like Doctorow and Shirky like to think of Wikipedia as a success. And they’re right – as long as we agree that success, unlike expertise, is a social construct.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Seth Finkelstein points out that Clay Shirky adds a clarification in the comments to his post: “I should have been clearer that I’m talking about the distinction between having expertise and being an expert. The latter category is where issues of authority come in, and what seems to get Sanger worked up is his belief that the overlap of expertise and experts is large.” More discussion follows in the comments to this<\/i> post.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Larry Sanger has responded<\/a> to Clay Shirky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“An expert-focused Wikipedia,” writes Cory Doctorow, in reference to Larry Sanger’s proposed Citizendium, “would likely devolve into interminable pissing matches over who was and was not qualified to be called an expert, because expertise isn’t a measurable quantity, but rather something that is socially constructed.” What Doctorow is predicting in the first half of that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}