The Downside To Wikipedia

Despite being an amazing resource for information, not to mention a free one, Wikipedia is not without its downsides. I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of it, since I don't think beggars should really be choosers, but a close friend and colleague pointed out that

Wikipedia is in need of an expert on linguistics.

I don't necessarily disagree, but I think wikipedia needs fewer dilettantes and crazy moderators. Aside from my personal distate of the people who seem to scour through articles looking for uncited statements, there seem to be people who want to enforce certain rules without fully understanding the scope of it.

During my undergrad years I was told by an advisor to take a class called Spanish Conversation and Composition 2. I didn't have a problem since it was just review for me, but once I got into the class, it was a fiasco. There was almost no conversation to be had, and aside from the terrible method for producing a paper, which had in the style of a news article (well, terrible for me, and I imagine anybody who can write somewhat competently) the instructor said that we had to pick a controversial, or at least debatable, topic and present both sides to the story, evenly and balanced. Bias was absolutely disapproved of, as it was "not journalistic." Aside from that being a crock for the journalistic world, I can think of a few scholars who would disagree as well.

Anyway, whilst perusing the wikipedia articles on many linguistics and linguistics-related articles, I came across a few (sadly I don't recall wherein, or particularly care to rediscover them) articles in which somebody brought up the concern that certain articles or sections were written with a "descriptivist bias" or something to that effect, and requested the inclusion of prescriptivists and their views to sections, to even things out.

Now, I'm not gung-ho on the idea of stringing up all of the alleged prescriptivists out there, but I do remember my first few linguistics classes and the teaches basically denouncing all that is prescriptive, and even one professor who made a whole red scare out of it, and would practically scream across the classroom "you are a prescriptivist!" sounding as if they just called for a pogrom or something. There are probably a few descriptivist-heads out there who never got the full story and took the fight straight to wikipedia. It's a shame they were only met with people who don't even understand the debate.