Wikipedia's "anti-elitism" is a feature, not a bug

A Wikipedia co-founder,Kuro5hin published an article, in which he slams Wikipedia for its 'anti-elitism' and calls on the organization to mend its ways in order to earn the confidence of academics, librarians and other learned types.

He explains:

"The root problem: anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise. There is a deeper problem--or I, at least, regard it as a problem...
Namely, as a community, Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, far from being elitist (which would, in this context, mean excluding the unwashed masses), it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated). This is one of my failures: a policy that I attempted to institute in Wikipedia's first year, but for which I did not muster adequate support, was the policy of respecting and deferring politely to experts."

I'm not familiar with the inner workings of Wikipedia, but the article seemed wrong to me. I just couldn't put my finger on it.
Now Clay Shirky -- himself an academic -- has written a wonderful and comprehensive rebuttal of the piece, explaining why complaints of "anti-elitism" are misplaced.

"Of course librarians, teachers, and academics don't like the Wikipedia. It works without privelege, which is inimical to the way those professions operate.
This is not some easily fixed cosmetic flaw, it is the Wikipedia's driving force. You can see the reactionary core of the academy playing out in the horror around Google digitizing books held at Harvard and the Library of Congress -- the NY Times published a number of letters by people insisting that real scholarship would still only be possible when done in real libraries. The physical book, the hushed tones, the monastic dedication, and (unspoken) the barriers to use, these are all essential characteristics of the academy today.

It's not that it doesn't matter what academics think of the Wikipedia -- it would obviously be better to have as many smart people using it as possible. The problem is that the only thing that would make the academics happy would be to shoehorn it into the kind of filter, then publish model that is broken, and would make the Wikipedia broken as well."