Wikipedia Inquiry Opens: Please Join in
I have been resisting my blog post on wikipedia "the free encyclopedia" for some time, and I am going to keep resisting it: except to say the whole concept exites and scares me: - the former being I love the free access to knowledge and information and I love reference tools and research without having to lug around a set of books (though I still love books!) — the latter coming from the tension of collective wisdom being collectively held but not always true/accurate. That and the ‘but I read it [on the internet] effect. Just becuase people see something it isn’t true. And wise versa. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
There is more and I will come back to it another day, however today I am writing on Wikipedia to throw caution on the biggest news in blog- and internet- and some other- spheres*: Wikipedia vs Britannica showdown.
The news clearly spread like a virus (which means the message was fresh, ‘revelant’ AND sticky)
My reason for bringing up this article: I tend to refrain from this blogging on this type of thing on the assumption that everyone knows the same news as me. I have had this assumption challenged too many times recently so…
I would like to:
1. share the article
2. make a conscious note that Wikipedia exists and is being used as a huge source for people. The extent that it is perceived by our ‘younger’ members of society as a trusted source is clear! For instance, I was asked as a favour by a friend who is also a Professor to do a quick read through of his classes essays to help him out in marking. A few students had used Wikipedia as their source and actually referenced it as the source, as opposed to seeking the source from which the Wikipedia information had been gathered from.
3. Ask you to inquire critically in these media that are shaping us as we shape them - does this bother you, impact you, enthuze you? excite you? scare you…etc?
4. Add caution that I *think* I read on Steven Berlin Johnson’s blog but now can’t find: What if we have been overvaluing Encyclopedia Brittanica’s abilities/wisdom as an accurate source of information in the first place? This is important as like all books, and like the law, on areas where we are still learning, what we are reading can often a few years out of ‘date’ from the research and knowledge that is being built on by scientists in dialogue with each other every day…in my mind sources like Wikipedia are good starts for a research hunt, not instead of the hunt.
* Aside from Delicious, the bookmarking/tagging site being swallowed up by Yahoo (who in yet another unwritten blog post stands to quite possibly overtake Google - especially if they hired me to tweak their branding…- in part because of the slow change in language the tech world is beginning to use for Google: from ‘cool’ to ’evil’…a subtle and neither true nor unfounded shift that I am predicting/seeing as a far more possible possibility than a while ago).
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December 17th, 2005 at 3:12 am
I’d find it hard to believe that everything I believe is in fact accurate. I’m sure that somewhere along the line I’ve been told something untrue, made an assumption that I haven’t yet recognized as invalid, or mixed up something I was told and misunderstood it. But luckily I have many years to reconcile my inaccurate facts stored in my head, and screw up the accurate facts. But even though I don’t believe that I know everything, and I’m sure you don’t believe that either, somehow you do manage to take some of the things I say as fact. In any reputable encyclopedia, facts are supposed to be checked and rechecked. I’m not sure if wikipedia follows this policy either, but it doesn’t matter. Something will be missed either way, somebody’s opinion will stind find its way in, and collective opinion is not always correct. In the beginning of the century western culture believed that a healthy diet consisted of eating bacon and eggs in the morning, lots of potatoes and steak and fruits and vegetables laced with butter and salt. Then in the 80s we wised up and realized that eating eggs and bacon every morning isn’t so healthy, and that too much salt can be bad for you. In the 90s we traded butter for margarine and white bread for rye or multi-grains. And then in the early part of this decade many people believed that bacon, eggs, salt and butter are fine, and the bread and potatoes needed to go. In short, no source is completely accurate. The danger is not that people trust one particular source, its that they trust just one particular source.
December 17th, 2005 at 6:59 am
natalie,
wikipedia is an excellent source since it allows for a collective mind to put articles together and to share knowledge; in extremely quickly changing/revised topics, this is going to give a poor result but for the vast majority of definitions, this is not going to be a problem. An ant is still going to be described as the same sort of thing for a long time to come.
I see this group authorship idea as being a small revolution of konwledge creation. The only trouble really comes about when the collective mind is wrong, but this is a risk either way;
To let you see a simplified way that I see wikipedia working, check out ‘the smaller picture’ : http://kevan.org/smaller.cgi. Interestingly, some pictures are random and people have no idea.
as to how I feel about this media creation - I love it. it allows everyone to have a printing press, and for knowledge to disseminate faster. mistakes are going to be rare since many more people are viewing the pages than are writing them - theres a saying by a guy called Linus Torvalds (do you know who that is?) with regards to open source software: “With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.”
Same thing goes for wikipedia.
Anyway, thats enough free thought for now. Love your work,
December 17th, 2005 at 10:40 pm
Would wikipedia exist if there’d never been conventional encyclopedias? Or would its creators, realizing how novel their idea was, have turned it into a money-making venture and in essence invented the encyclopedia?
Would open source software exist if there’d never been large, structured, corporate and university software development projects? Is Torvalds’ conceit (prob. originated in Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”) a fantasy of the same sort as communism? I.e., that a “knowledge proletariat” will successfully revolt againt the “knowledge elite” because, essentially, the latter are not needed?
Are the people who are truly innovating in software development or knowledge presentation writing open source software or wikipedias? Or are they laboring on some mind-blowing idea which will bubble into the zeitgeist a decade from now? Bubble up and be so incorporated that everybody believes a collective of novices could have achieved the same thing, forgetting the originator of the idea as well as its very originality?
January 4th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
Is anything ever truly completely and unbiasedly “accurate” anyway? History is written by the victor. Encyclopedia entries are written by those awarded the task (the victors of the selection process?!).
If we break the world down into facts-knowledge-wisdom, encyclopedias would sit in the facts-knowledge space. We still need to equip ourselves with the necessary thought processes, the gut-intuition, the wisdom to decipher/evaluate these facts/knowledge.
Wikipedia is exciting to me because (a) it flies against all cynicisms on public contribution and collective ownership of something public, (b) it is a sort of knowledge revolution, one that is perhaps a tad more organically in sympathy with human oral traditions, the spreading of fashionable memes as a collective and constantly in-flux…