Endgame Viable

Nicolas Carr’s blog article, The amorality of Web 2.0, rocks. (There’s some technical mumbo-jumbo, but there’s also a bunch of regular English words I didn’t know, either. :) There has always been something about Open Source that has made me uneasy, but I’ve never really been able to put my finger on exactly what it was. Nicolas Carr is able to put “it” into words and apply it to Open Source, the Blogosphere, Wikipedia, and everything else. And the word is: Mediocrity. He calls it the “Cult of the Amateur.” He writes, after citing some example Wikipedia entries:

Remember, this emanation of collective intelligence is not just a couple of months old. It’s been around for nearly five years and has been worked over by many thousands of diligent contributors. At this point, it seems fair to ask exactly when the intelligence in “collective intelligence” will begin to manifest itself. When will the great Wikipedia get good? Or is “good” an old-fashioned concept that doesn’t apply to emergent phenomena like communal on-line encyclopedias?