The Tragedy Of the Communal

At this point, it seems fair to ask exactly when the intelligence in “collective intelligence” will begin to manifest itself.

Blogger Nicholas Carr, talking about the badly written and frequently inaccurate Wikipedia in his skeptical article about the community-driven “Web 2.0.”

Communal writing, like communal software development, communal music-making, or communal anything else, benefits from expertise and organization. This should not come as a surprise, and it doesn’t mean that open-source software, or blogs, or bluegrass jams, can’t be wonderful. It just means that some things will never change, no matter what technology you throw at the problem. Ten years ago, it was “way-new journalism” where “everyone is a reporter!” Back then, the question was, “where are the editors?” Now it’s “Everyone’s an editor!” Riiiiiiiight.