<p>I disagree.</p>

<p>Interesting example you gave. Look at the unresolved issues with AIC on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Akaike_information_criterion" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Wikipedia talk page</a>. The quality of posts on CV for AIC is distinctly better, e.g., <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/577/is-there-any-reason-to-prefer-the-aic-or-bic-over-the-other">Is there any reason to prefer the AIC or BIC over the other?</a> </p>

<p>There is not the same quality democratic structure on Wikipedia as there is on CV, and a good deal of bullying on Wikipedia that we do not permit here. Wikipedia has self-appointed authorities, which can result in some really heavily biased opinions. On CV who has authority is much more refined, obvious and commonly understood. This issue is important once it is understood what the strengths and weaknesses of democracy are. Democracy is good for identifying points of agreement, but democratic discard of ideas tends to be highly flawed as it cannot easily identify common misconception due to the logistics of discrediting <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias" rel="nofollow noreferrer">confirmation bias</a>. For discard of bias, a good structure for recognizing earned authoritarian status is needed, as a "leader" in a democracy has a better chance of identifying when common opinion is incorrect than a simple vote would allow.</p>

<p>Summarizing, I trust CV but not Wikipedia, and I take Wikipedia with a grain of salt. Google is all inclusive, and does not differentiate between quality of opinion, or for that matter, quality of scientific journal opinions, which, BTW, has deteriorated with the inclusion of predatory publisher's listings.</p>

<p>Having democratic features on a site is good when a consensus can be achieved, that is, majority opinion is good at finding true positives. However, expertise weighted opinion is better than majority opinion at identifying false negatives. Read this article for <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134269" rel="nofollow noreferrer">specifics</a>. I mean it---read it! We sort of know this, as downvoting costs us 2 reputation points, and only penalizes at 2/5$^{ths}$ to 2/10$^{ths}$ of the rate of positive voting. Moreover, voting to close or open a question requires a reputation of 3k+, downvoting requires a reputation of 125+ whereas upvoting only 15+. I would argue that voting to open a question should require less reputation than voting to close one. PS @NickCox RE: "interested in seeing that evidence", as above.</p>

<p>Our current policy is 'already answered by CV.' I would suggest that we continue that. When we give an answer that refers to another source, that source has been screened by the person answering, and if there are problems associated with that source, we have a democratic procedure for disagreeing with that screener's opinion.</p>
