questioning authority

My boyfriend and I just finished a long discussion about the virtues of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. As much as I reveled in that Nature article when it came out, I found myself defending Britannica after reading their rebuttal. Sure, they're haughty and dismissive of major issues concerning their editing process, but their concerns are valid; Nature really does seem to have performed some sloppy work.

The major concerns I have about Britannica are parts that they don't seem to find problematic at all, as evidenced by the fact that they admit to their practices without issue.

• "Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannicawere not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopædia Britannica." Here, I later learned that they were referring to articles that had been chosen from their yearbook or elsewhere. But initially, I thought they were admitting that certain articles in Wikipedia weren't present in Britannica. One of the beautiful things about Wikipedia is that it does not have to meet publishing criteria; it can have lengthy articles about every South Park episode ever made, and only the readers interested in such things need to be burdened with all that space being taken up with those articles. Wikipedia can cover information so much more arcane, and so much faster, than any "authoritative" publication.
  
• "This is not a critical omission. This 825-word article sets out to explain the most significant contributions of Dirac’s career, and it does just that." Well, it does just that, according to the editors. So, what are the most important things about Dirac? How does one know this? Wikipedia doesn't have to edit things down, so it's all included.
  

This flattening-of-informational-hierarchy vs. experienced editing was where the boyfriend and I really disagreed. Sure it's great to have everyone participate, show the messiness of all editorial decisions, how there are no right answers, etc. But sometimes you just need the 5 sentence explanation for what Dirac did so that you can catch the reference in the thing you're reading and then move on. As someone who edits professionally, I have a lot invested in the idea that there are more and less logical ways of presenting information. Giant, unorganized data dumps help no one understand anything. Progressively more complicated, nuanced explanations do help.

That said, I agree with him that authority is a problem. When you see the great Wizard of Oz and don't get to view behind the curtain, you may think that he's great and powerful and absolutely right all the time. The implicit authority of publications like Encyclopedia Britannica, which is not unconnected to the British colonial project and the idea of the supremacy of British knowledge, is what's erased women and minorities from many historical events. As in the Light article on "When computers were women," authorities have their own biases (which EB actually admits and argues with in their rebuttal), and these biases have very real, though often tacit impacts on our perceptions of history.

Is there a happy medium behind the unedited messiness of Wikipedia and the imposing authority of Britannica?