Larry Sanger has good points, but some of his articles were a bit impenetrable

Larry Sanger has good points, but some of his articles were a bit impenetrable

I've read a number of Larry Sanger's old Wikipedia articles on philosophy. While his articles contained a lot of good, expert level material, they also tended to read more like lecture notes from a graduate-level class than like encyclopedia articles. His writing style was informal, didactic, opinionated, and occasionally inaccessible to a lay reader.

In the right place, there is nothing wrong being informal, opinionated, or highly technical. (After, I'm frequently accused of these traits myself.) But Sanger's style perhaps wasn't the best fit for Wikipedia.

In my experience, Wikipedia isn't hostile to experts, per se. Like any open project, it favors certain personality traits, and requires some patience with trolls and the terminally confused.

Flawed Wikipedia articles generally have several causes:

a) Nobody has ever been interested enough to write a good article. This is an inevitable fact of life, especially for obscure topics.

b) The article has an infestation of "difficult" editors--this happens particularly on cultural "hot button" topics. Some difficult people aren't worth messing with unless you're prepared to go all the way to the Arbitration Committee, and that's a big pain.

c) The article has bit-rotted into oblivion, because nobody can be bothered to keep it fixed.

There's a few other pathologies which can produce well-written, competent articles with a lot of subtle errors. These generally occur when domain experts are scarce, or accurate sources are hard to find.