Wikipedia. . .democracy in action or Colbert's "truthiness" in action? Both?
For those of you not in the know, Wikipedia generates encyclopedic definitions by way of general consensus. That is, what passes for truth on Wikipedia is none other than the overwhelming opinions of the majority of people who decide to care enough to write and critique the work of others. . . on Wikipedia.
At first blush this sounds like a wonderful idea. Give everyone a shot at defining a topic, and let the rest of the world critique them and argue over what they've said. History, no longer written only by the winner, but also informed by the perspective of the loser! A chance for egalitarian thinking writ large!
Yes. Yes. But wait, how much does the general populace acting as a collective really know anyway? Who's version of the truth are we willing to accept? My experience has been that true democracy of thought often means settling for the lowest common denominator. I think I'm more of an advocate of the free play of the minds of experts than I am the petty infighting of the masses.
Nevertheless, however you come down, Wikipedia raises some interesting questions about the nature of truth, the usefulness of experts in a given field, and the general veracity of a mob.
A few questions that come to mind for me: 1) Is truth nothing more than the consensus of the majority? 2) Is the communication of actual events corrupted more or less with this type of format... as opposed to an encyclopedia of the past? 3) If power was a complaint with regard to the veracity of past texts, what does it say about Wikipedia that Colbert can have all his fans go onto Wikipedia and literally change the definition for a given topic to something completely fallacious?
7 comments:
I hadn't heard of that Colbert case, but I do know that Wikipedia in general isn't for definitions (that's WikiDictionary). Also, Wikipedia is far from being merely "consensus" truth--there's an explicit onus on the authors to cite facts. Basically, everything in it has to be empirically verifiable, and I see no downside to letting whomever wants to to enter in verifiable facts.
I heard a story on NPR a while ago that compared accuracy of entries of Wikipedia with the Encyclopedia Britannica, and found the error rate to be very close between the two sources.
Well that bursts my bubble! =) Thanks for the info.
Great Post!
Isn't truth always mediated by our worldwiew, perspective, experiences, etc? Isn't it true :) that truth is absolute but our experience of truth is always mediated and therefore subject to being "corrupted more or less?"
And then there's the view that, as that pomo curmudgeon said, "Truth is what our peers will let us get away with saying." (Richard Rorty)
Irony.
The new york times had an interesting article about democracy, along the same lines as my post, over the weekend. Basically saying, if the population is largely ignorant, gullible to the persuasive forces of marketing, etc, then is Democracy good?
UPDATE: here
This is all fine and good when someone knows the deception's coming, but what about issues not monitored as closely, or tipped off?
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