Dave Winer has a good post that takes a balanced look at some of the challenges facing Wikipedia. It's especially timely given that amount of news that Jimbo Wales has been generating about his personal life, his relationship with the organization and how wikipedia handles edits to its pages. Relevant links via Valleywag here. Since it's Valleywag, consider the source. ;)
Two things worth restating here, since I've written about Wikipedia previously. First, it's an increasingly important but also potentially fatally flawed resource. It's important because of the vast amount of information contained in it, the way it pops to the top of searches and the speed with which it is updated. Second, It's flawed because of the uneven nature of the entries, and right now, the trust issues that are swirling around its most visible leader.
The Economist Tech Quarterly had a good piece a few weeks ago where they examined yet another challenge the group was facing:
IT IS the biggest encyclopedia in history and the most successful example of “user-generated content” on the internet, with over 9m articles in 250 languages contributed by volunteers collaborating online. But Wikipedia is facing an identity crisis as it is torn between two alternative futures. It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between “inclusionists”, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and “deletionists” who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries.
At this point, given the influential nature Wikipedia plays in distributing information, and its success story as the biggest of all UCG projects of all time, the pluses outweigh the minuses. But the trust issues that Dave talks about and which Wales is coming to embody strike at the very core of what makes the org and its output special. Trust and authority are hugely linked; if the Wikipedians don't find a way to increase their internal transparency and their external explanations via Wales, they stand the risk of seeing what they have built slide toward irrelevancy.