Thanks for sharing your reactions, Ethan. You haven’t gotten under my skin yourself. I was pleased to see your original post on the subject, and am excited by the attention it has gotten — if I am touchy about exaggerations of this class of comparison, it is precisely because I want people to focus on how the pool of contributors can be and is being expanded. Imperfect coverage should not be construed as a reason to discount what information exists. And I want the metric for coverage to be updated as quickly as Wikipedia itself is.

There is slightly more information in Wikipedia on Middle Earth than on Central Africa, though that will not be the case for much longer — in the former case, most everything that could be written about the subject has been. And one could say more strongly – there should be no single country with less information about its history and inhabitants, than exists about Middle Earth. I’ll let you know when Central Africa is no longer a small enough region for comparison.

I share your concerns about Wikipedia being used as a replacement for traditional sources for research. One of the misfortunes of our society is how quickly something easier to use can completely replace a predecessor which was still superior in many ways. In this particular case, I am sure that we can eventually have uniformly broad and deep coverage in a free encyclopedia.

I’m sorry my way of framing the issue of systemic biases in peer produced media got under your skin. I’ve offered the observation – not mine, by the way, but Xed Mac’s – as a pithy way of making a more complex point: the beauty and brilliance of wikipedia is a function of the fact that people write what they want to write about. The downside of this strength is that the group work is stronger in areas that are of interest to the writers than in areas where they lack expertise.

I don’t find it especially reassuring that wikipedia authors are branching out into topics they’re not naturally inclined to cover. While I appreciate the sentiment behind projects that try to get wikipedia authors working on novel subjects, I’d much rather see a concerted effort to change the peer base, and recruit more people who would naturally be inclined to write articles on African economics. While I’m sure I could research and assemble a competent article on Ents, I would be at a disadvantage, writing on a field where I’m inexperienced, and, historically speaking, uninterested – I worry that authors taking on subjects they know little about – except that they’re uncovered – may be as lost as I would be writing about Tolkien.

Defending wikipedia’s structure by demonstrating that there are three times as many articles on a real place where 800 million people live than on a compelling fictional universe seems to demonstrate my point as much as yours. (In making the statement in public, as I did in a speech last week, I’ve used the phrase “More information on Middle Earth than on Central Africa”, a comparison that may still turn out to be true.)

My point is not that there’s an optimal Africa/Tolkein ratio for an online encyclopedia, but that a peer produced system will come into being differently than a top-down encyclopedia. This is not a bad thing – it makes Wikipedia tremendously useful for some purposes – but it means that there are ways in which a peer-produced encyclopedia will come up short in comparison to a traditional encyclopedia. What percent of the total articles on Wikipedia cover African issues, versus a traditional encyclopedia?

Holding wikipedia and a traditional encyclopedia side by side, I suspect that wikipedia has better and deeper coversage of certain areas (technology, some aspects of politics, some types of media) than the traditional encyclopedia, and weaker coverage on some economic, political and historical topics. (I’m looking for good ways to do this experiment, and would be grateful for your thoughts on it.) Even if that proves to be the case – that’s okay. That’s how peer production works. Once we’ve identified the problem, we can work to change the peer group working on wikipedia and broaden coverage on certain topics. Or we can decide that wikipedia may have a different coverage profile than a traditional encyclopedia.

What concerns me is that wikipedia is increasingly held up as a _replacement_ for traditional encyclopedic media, and I don’t think it’s there yet. Just because wikipedia, in terms of raw numbers, has more articles than a traditional encyclopedia, it does not mean that coverage in all areas is as broad or deep.