It's been hard to miss all the sturm und drang about Wikipedia these past couple of weeks. Issues over authority are an inevitability when you have an open engine for community input that relinquishes control in favor of accessibility. Some self-serving attempts to rewrite history and some character assassination bubbled to the surface recently and brought this issue into sharp focus.

Nicholas Carr, who has demonstrated an almost Dave Winer-like ability to get under people's skin by simply telling it like he sees it, provides an excellent analysis of the situation that is well worth reading. Essentially Carr argues that Wikipedia should abandon any pretense of being an authoritative reference and should be content to be what it is and will always be: an incredible aggregation of human knowledge that will always be colored by individual bias. Carr's summary is priceless:

"Dump the "authoritative" shtick. Kill the "Free Encyclopedia" tag line. Discourage the syndication of content by sites like Reference.com and Answers.com. Tell the utopianists and the A-Listers to get stuffed. Stick a little disclaimer at the top of every page that says, "Wikipedia is not intended to be an authoritative reference work and should not be used as one. If you see an error or omission, feel free to fix it." And then go at. See what happens. Leave encyclopedia editing to the encyclopedia editors. Be Wikipedians."