Digg, wikipedia and corruption

This was a rather weird news run for me. In such a short time both digg and wikipedia took quite a credibility hit. Let's see..

"I Bought Votes on Digg" (Wired News)
Hunting Down Digg's Bury Brigade (Wired News)
On Buries and Blocking (digg blog)
Digg Should Sue Wired (TechCrunch)

This is rapidly developing into some sort of an infowar with currently two main sides are Wired and the digg skeptics and digg and its supporters.

And to top this, digg also had the following story on its homepage:

On Wikipedia, no one knows you're a 24-year-old with no credentials. The title put on digg is Jimmy Wales defends a massive liar..

Apparently, Jimmy Wales defended one of the wikipedia administrators who has misrepresented himself as someone who he is not, even after this was revealed. In comments to this story I also found a link to Wikitruth.info, apparently an anti-wikipedia site that is revealing the painful truth about wikipedia.

This story is apparently quoting excerpts from an IRC discussions in which it would seem as Jimmy Wales deeply cares about the way his status is portrayed in the wikipedia. He believes, according to this, that he is the sole founder of wikipedia and that Larry Sanger shouldn't be called a co-founder.. you can read it yourself..

So there it is, enough meat for skeptics to feast on, pointing and shouting how all this is proof that collective cooperative projects like wikipedia or digg don't work, how "commons based peer production" doesn't work or that it simply, as far as these two projects go, hasn't been implemented properly. OK I haven't yet heard big claims like that about the commons model in general, but it's easy to see it coming now, especially from those who may believe that regulating and controling the internet by law, governments and corporations is a good thing, because otherwise it will be chaos.

But that would be incredibly blind and stupid. Even if Jimmy Wales became a corrupt "leader" and digg system is a bit flawed, there is an undeniable fact that wikipedia has more than a million of articles of which the *majority* in fact is very informative and that digg.com succesfully points to some of the most interesting stories on the web. How can that be a failure? It isn't.

In fact, this criticism to a point proves that it isn't. If it were a closed, regulated and controled system it would be much harder to constructively or unconstructively criticize. Maybe this criticism, these conflicts, these doubts are in fact ways of the system correcting itself.

So it works.