For those not following closely, it’s probably news that Wikipedia’s management structure–Wikipedia has a management structure?–is being critiqued because of what The Register, an online technology newspaper, said was new evidence that “the site’s top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.” You can read all the details elsewhere, because this piece has nothing to do with the encyclopedia’s politics–however full of secrecy and intrigue–and everything to do with its usefulness.

People have denigrated Wikipedia from the beginning. First, they couldn’t believe anyone but well-groomed academicians could write about anything. Then they were sure that it was too easy to deface it with baldfaced lies. Now–though those earlier critiques are still regularly heard–people say that teachers–and especially the infallable “college professors” docks points for citing it. None of these critiques are completely unfounded, but all of them are insufficient to mean that society should abandon Wikipedia as a valuable and free encyclopedia.

Most of the trouble people have with Wikipedia is that they misunderstand how traditional encyclopedias are written. Britannica or World Book are written by a diverse and geographically-distant team of writers. Surely they aren’t “amateurs,” after all they’re paid by the encyclopedia they write for, but they’re hardly universally recognized experts in the field about which they write.

Wikipedia, like these, is written by people who know enough about a topic to explain its basics, but aren’t spending their time learning every possible detail. This is the fundamental reason that the third critique I cited falls flat. Every college professor, and potentially every high school teacher, should forbid their students from ever citing an encyclopedia. They’re great introductions to a given topic, but are terrible at exposing the complexity and nuance of things.

But this is no more a flaw with Wikipedia as it is with World Book, Britannica, or a common dictionary. Every resource that aims to be comprehensive must necessarily also be brief. Anyone who’s seen one of the dozens of biographies of Abraham Lincoln knows that Wikipedia’s article contains far less information. But so does every other encyclopedia.

To the complaint of vandalism and inaccuracies, I find it hard to say that they’re any more numerous than those found in any other encyclopedias. Without going into the detail–which I admittedly don’t know–Wikipedia’s mandarins do a fairly solid job of assuring that any blatant vandalism is both removed, and the perpetrating account put on watch. General inaccuracies are a problems that only the most expert people in a field can assure are never made. This doesn’t mean that Wikipedia is free of errors, but at least one study by the science journal Nature (BBC article, Nature‘s is behind a paywall) found the number of errors on Wikipedia to be comparable with traditional encyclopedias.

I would never categorize Wikipedia as a “repository of all knowledge” or a “perfect source of truth” but failing to reach these unrealistic standards is hardly a reason to condemn it. It is a great step toward the democratization of knowledge–even if its writing can sometimes be muddled and difficult–and that can’t be a bad thing. I don’t think anyone but encyclopedia publishers yearns for the days when a working man would buy Britannica one volume at a time so that his children could have access to an encyclopedia’s knowledge. Today all he needs is an internet connection–which isn’t free, but is much more affordable than Britannica was–and he can get as much or more knowledge than Britannica ever offered.