If I wrote wikipedia entry about picking coconuts, it would be immediately deleted because personal experience isn't a citable source. I need to tell some other fool about what I do, have him publish it in an article, and only then am I worthy of sharing my knowledge on wikipedia.
I've seen absolute hogwash in wikipedia articles about my field (not really picking coconuts lol) but I can't correct them because I can't find an article where someone else has written about the topic.
Wikipedia's job isn't to push forward the frontiers of knowledge. It's to summarize the stuff you can look up elsewhere.
Wikipedia prioritizes verifiability over completeness. Are there downsides to that trade-off? Absolutely. But i would rather that over trusting random people on the internet to know what they are talking about.
A lot of what people complain about Wikipedia ruling out is in scope for either Wikiversity or Wikibooks; it's not a “we don't want that” issue but a “we have structure, and within that structure there is a better place for that”.
Personal experience is hogwash. Everyone is convinced their personal experience is an accurate view of how things really are, and everyone is wrong. I have no idea if the "world's best coconuts pickers first hand experience" is as laughably wrong as my first person experience of American demographics, and I have absolutely no way to find out. Wikipedia standards exist for a reason.
You're convinced that your personal experience of everyone's convictions and the veracity of such is accurate. By your reasoning, you must be wrong?
...or are you? A most ingenious paradox.
The Encyclopedia Britannica, which had articles exclusively written by experts, was also outcompeted by Wikipedia.
It's unlikely that Wikipedia is going to change its model to give experts a greater say than they already do, but it would be interesting to see if another expert-curated encyclopedia could eventually compete. Maybe if some incredibly well-funded company like Google or Apple got behind it it could work (though that reminds me of Microsoft's Encarta, which also failed).
They were competing on free vs paid. You make it sound like they were competing on experts vs non-experts.
Ah, young and halcyon days!
Wikipedia follows different standards. Not everything have to be Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/HN.
To sometimes very very mixed results (at best).
