Deborah Solomon, she of the penetrating questions, took Chris Anderson to task for l’affaire Wikipedia in yesterday’s NYT, eliciting a revealing exchange.

First she asked whether he considered plagiarism an extension of his freebie thesis, which batted down thusly:

“I wish I could explain all my actions as being intellectually consistent, but this one is just plain old sloppiness. There are questions about whether one should cite Wikipedia, and I’m one of those who think you should.”

Nice slight of hand: He starts out on a self-deprecating note, then asserts a sense of honor about, of all things, crediting Wikipedia in a supposedly rigorous economic treatise. Luckily, Solomon calls him on it.

“Frankly, if you want to be a public intellectual, you shouldn’t be using Wikipedia to research a book of ideas in the first place,” she observes.

Anderson’s less than satisfactory response: “The level of scholarship and analysis on Wikipedia is improving by the day, and we ignore it at our peril.”

Again, note the self-righteous tone. Anderson clearly has the power of his convictions.

Solomon also touches on the quality issue, which bugged me so, noting that people have proven willing to pay subscription fees for HBO, but Anderson rejects that model as so 15 years ago. “The marketplace wants free,” he parries. “Consumers want free, and if you decide to set up a subscription service, then your competitor will make a free one.”

Did I miss something here? Is HBO really suffering because of the free TV or Web programming? If anything, struggles to replicate earlier programming success — a quality issue — seem to have been the issue. And I won’t even reiterate the iTunes example. Oh wait, I just did.