Here is a letter (responding to this) I just submitted to the Christian Science Monitor (it's a bit insulting so I'll be surprised if they publish it):
While the CSM's commentary on Wikipedia does a good job of paraphrasing the current journalistic narrative ('Wikipedia is democratizing knowledge! etc.'), because this narrative is horribly confused and flawed it misses the point entirely. No academic 'authority' finds Wikipedia threatening in the least.
Intellectual authority is decided not by who says it, but what they say. While perhaps lay people believe a scientist's words because she is an 'expert', her peers believe her because her arguments and evidence are convincing. The same applies to Wikipedia.
Similarly, in an age of 'information overload' the problem is not who or what has the knowledge or truth. The problem remains that knowledge and truth take work and effort to understand -- no quantity of factoids will lead you to understand a complex mathematical concept (or any other concept for that matter).
If anything is threatening about Wikipedia it is that it can lead to a false impression that one has an adequate grasp on a nuanced set of ideas -- a danger to which (evidently) journalists must pay particularly close attention.
