Great article on the creation of Wikipedia — Wired 13.03: The Book Stops Here
Critique of Wikipedia:
Larry Sanger gave voice to these criticisms in a recent essay posted on kuro5hin.org titled Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism Although he acknowledges that “Wikipedia is very cool,” he argues that the site’s production model suffers from two big problems.
The first is that “regardless of whether Wikipedia actually is more or less reliable than the average encyclopedia,” librarians, teachers, and academics don’t perceive it as credible, because it has no formal review process. The second problem, according to Sanger, is that the site in general and Wales in particular are too “anti-elitist.” Established scholars might be willing to contribute to Wikipedia - but not if they have to deal with trolls and especially not if they’re considered no different from any schmo with an iMac.