The rhetoric surrounding the "world-changing" nature of Digg, Google and Wikipedia borders on the messianic. Every time I read the overheated rhetoric of the 2.0 adherents of these innovations, I look over my shoulder to see if the Rapture is upon us.
All three services have been dogged with complaints that they're not as pure and democratic as true believers hope. Google is aggressively fighting the system gaming of click fraud, which John Battelle in The Search (p. 187) estimates accounts for 25-30% of online search engine ad revenue. Wikipedia seems dogged by controversy on a daily basis. And now devotees of Digg have been complaining that the service appears not to be as user-driven and democratic as billed.
Donna Bogatin on the ZDNet blog does a great job of explaining the fierce resistance one faces from adherents any time a criticism is leveled against one of these services:
Digg, Google and Wikipedia are invested in maintaining their “as-is” status-quo, no matter how flawed. Not one of the three powerhouses can risk diminishing public confidence in the grandiose vaunted missions each espouses. The leaders of each of the flawed systems publicly evangelize a revolutionary worthiness of their endeavors to rationalize away allegations of abuse, entrenchment, spam, falsehoods, libel, infringement…with a “net-positive” argument.
Her blog entry, complete with quotes from the three sites and from their leaders, is gold and should be read in its entirety. But I must include this quote she took from Wikipedia's Verifiability page, last modified September 7th:
The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. "Verifiable" in this context means that any reader must be able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, because Wikipedia does not publish original thought or original research…"Verifiability" in this context does not mean that editors are expected to verify whether, for example, the contents of a New York Times article are true. In fact, editors are strongly discouraged from conducting this kind of research, because original research may not be published in Wikipedia. Articles should contain only material that has been published by reliable sources, regardless of whether individual editors view that material as true or false. The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is thus verifiability, not truth.
Translated, that passage seems to say: "Leave original scholarship to Encyclopaedia Britannica, academics and journalists. Your job is to steal original content from elsewhere. Don't ask the author for it first. It doesn't have to be correct, it just has to have somewhere on it indications of its origin, because we all know everybody who visits Wikipedia then takes the time to conduct an extensive search for the truth starting with examining the primary source material used in the article. They don't assume the material is true, just because they've read it in an encyclopedia that claims to be the future of knowledge."
These folks are just a hoot. Over time these messianic zealots will find society moving beyond them, like their predecessors Robert Owen and Charles Fourier.