Wikipedia and knowledge

This interview with one of the founders of wikipedia is in general somewhat interesting. But what really caught me was what he had to say about how experts are viewed:

Why did you feel so strongly about involving experts?

Because of the complete disregard for expert opinion among a group of amateurs working on a subject, and in particular because of their tendency to openly express contempt for experts. There was this attitude that experts should be disqualified [from participating] by the very fact that they had published on the subject—that because they had published, they were therefore biased. That frustrated me very much, to see that happening over and over again: experts essentially being driven away by people who didn't have any respect for those who make it their lives' work to know things.

Where do you think that contempt for expertise comes from? It's seems odd to be committed to a project that's all about sharing knowledge, yet dismiss those who've worked so hard to acquire it.

There's a whole worldview that's shared by many programmers—although not all of them, of course—and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as "epistemic egalitarianism." They're greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else. They feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content [of a claim] itself, not its source.

I thought that fit in very well with all the discussion of wikileaks and the idea of getting information with no knowledge of the source. See the great New Yorker Piece about wikileaks and the slate article claiming transparency means revealing sources. While I somewhat agree that getting a bunch of data without knowing the source is questionable, I do think wikileaks is a very cool idea (although it would say more about the site if the dominate story didn't always become the site rather than the info it is disclosing).

Hm, I feel like there's some clever conclusion to be reached, but I don't feel like thinking that hard right now. But I do think that it is common for people to look at a subjects like economics, global politics, climate change, and health/medicine and try to evaluate the facts for themselves while dismissing the opinions of experts, and on the other side blindly trusting experts without doing any of their own checking (as a person I include myself in this).

For example, recently people are rather unhappy with economic experts, but listening to amateur economists explain why they know better than the expert consensus, possibly based on some document that sounded like fact to them, gets rather absurd.