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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4217099" data-attributes="member: 4937">No, but I would argue that no humanly edited source is going to achieve it either.  The same sorts of politics, biases, geekgasms, out right errors, and in fight occur when scholars get together to compose an encyclopedia.  This is why reviews of wikipedia's accuracy compared to tradiational survey material have shown no real difference in the quality of the two works.  The difference is first that in print media fewer people may actually be involved in the process and secondly that the process is opaque and intractable to the reader who wants to dig deeper.  At least in wiki, you can go and see what the various sides have been fighting over should you care to.In areas which are not contriversial, the average wiki article ends up being cared for largely by a couple of people who care about the topic more than anyone else in the world (or at least more than anyone else in the world who writes on wiki).  In many cases, these are among the most knowledgable people on the topic.  These often are the experts.  Wiki's mathimatics articles for example beat hands down any other general encylopedia.  It's only where we disagree over what is true about the topic that the nasty fights over what the content of the page is really occur.  Even this isn't entirely a bad thing though, because you at least get to hear from both sides.  Maybe one or both sides are lunatics, but that's going to more clearly come out in wikipedia than it would if the author was a single creepy academic promoting his pet belief system.Exactly.  The biggest protection from self-promotion is that a self-promotion site isn't going to recieve traffic unless its topic is really relevant and something people care about.  And if it is, pretty soon its going to draw in a crowd of geeks who will fight for the integrity of the topic.It's not perfect.  It's an ugly system and its easy to get disenchanted with it.  But its like Democracy: it's the worst possible system with the exception of all the other ones that have ever been designed.</blockquote>

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