There's been a bunch of discussion around the blogosphere lately on Wikipedia, including discussion of articles in the Boston Globe and the Syracuse Post-Standard challenging Wikipedia's accuracy and it's long term ability to be accurate. David Weinberger recently talked about Wikipedia, or any encyclopedia's, inability to handle complex truths.

Ethan Zuckerman provides some discussion of another issue that Wikipedia suffers from:

Now one million articles strong, Wikipedia is arguably the largest encyclopedia in the world. Its philosophy of radical openness - anyone can add or subtract anything at any time, though changes can be rolled back - hasn't led to chaos, but a fascinating system that corrects many acts of vandalism within five minutes. It's a fantastic gateway project for non-technical people interested in contributing to a large, meaningful Open project.

Amazing though it is, Wikipedia is not flawless. It's got a problem common to almost all peer production projects: people work on what they want to work on. (This "problem" is probably the secret sauce that makes peer production projects work... which is what makes it such a difficult problem to tackle.) Most of the people who work on Wikipedia are white, male technocrats from the US and Europe. They're especially knowledgeable about certain subjects - technology, science fiction, libertarianism, life in the US/Europe - and tend to write about these subjects. As a result, the resource tends to be extremely deep on technical topics and shallow in other areas. Nigeria's brilliant author, Chinua Achebe gets a 1582 byte "stub" of an article, while the GSM mobile phone standard gets 16,500 bytes of main entry, with dozens of related articles.

In the tradition of Wikipedia, a user--Xed has proposed CROSSBOW--Committee Regarding Overcoming Serious Systemic Bias On Wikipedia, which is designed to help reduce bias and make the encyclopedia even broader than it currently is.

There's a lot to learn from Wikipedia, particularly with regard to the knowledge of the whole versus individual experts. It's something I hope we'll be discussing in Extension as e-Extension, and everything we do, moves forward.