His biography is more verbose about it, but Clay Shirky is essentially a decentralization pundit.  Maybe even a zealot.  Consequently, he has a tendency to make sweeping generalizations, and a disinclination to concede any middle ground.  A lot of what he has said about other issues has been ill-informed and, sadly, widely repeated. 

His latest article is about Citizendium, a fork of the Wikipedia project headed by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger.  The goal of Citizendium is to make another Web-based encyclopedia, this time with a more centralized editorial process that marries user editing with review by "credentialed" experts. 

In "Larry Sanger, Citizendium, and the Problem of Expertise", he makes the following predictions:

1. "...you cannot have expertise without institutional overhead, and institutional overhead is what stifled Nupedia, and what will stifle Citizendium."
2. "policing certification will be a common case, and a huge time-sink. If there is a value to being an expert, people will self-certify to get at that value, not [sic] matter what their credentials. The editor-in-chief will then have to spend considerable time monitoring that process, and most of that time will be spent fighting about edge cases."
3. "Citizendium will re-create the core failure of Nupedia, namely putting at the center of the effort a process whose maintenance takes more energy than can be mustered by a volunteer project."
4. "citizens [will] rankle at the reflexive deference to editors; in reaction, they will debauch self-certification ... contest expert preogatives, rasing [sic] the cost of review to unsupportable levels... take to distributed protest ... or simply opt-out"

I post these predictions here so that I can check back later to see which he got right.  This is something I'd like to do on a regular basis, since I read a lot of what I consider to be fairly wild predictions passed off as though they were carefully studied and unbiased.

It's not so much that I think he will be wrong as that I'd like to make a point of fact-checking him.  I have my doubts about Citizendium as well, but I'm reserving judgment until I know more.