April 13, 2007
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http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/13/2018210
On slashdot today there is a comment where someone asks if it is ok for schools to ban wikipedia. This is such a question that is so extraordinarily unexpected to me that I would not have believed that anyone would ask it had I not read it for myself.
Block wikipedia in schools? Who would think such a thing was rational? Why not just opt out of the future of human development while you are it? This is insanity. Why? Would you be afraid that students might learn something that isn’t the strictly controlled knowledge that the schools teach? Afraid you can’t brain wash your students effectively? Afraid your students might have to deal with the discomfort of learning something that is not true and have to learn to verify and think for themselves? Afraid that the students might actually start to learn to contribute to the society and add to the free knowledge available to everyone? I just don’t get it. To know that there a schools out there that actually are doing this right now makes me feel very very bad about the world.
I am sure that if you were to stick a random observer in front of the internet in this day and age who has no experience or no outside knowledge of anything related to the internet and just asked him or her to browse through pages uses a standard search engine, one of the first and most useful sites he or she would come accross would be wikipedia. Not only that but I am sure that he or she would keep coming across it again and again and again while browsing the web and each time finding something useful or interesting in the process. Very soon I would expect such a person to rely on wikipedia as a baseline resource for information, a place to look first for data before looking onwards to more in depth sites. And often, wikipedia would prove sufficient in and of itself to satisfy the random reader’s bit of curiosity and he’d have no need to look onward.
There are many arguments against wikipedia. It is often under attack and often ridiculed both by people who have an agenda and by people who are wise and should know better. People complain about how quickly it changes, how people with an agenda might influence it or twist it, how the data is inherently unreliable, and sometimes they just argue that there are better resources to use and that it does not deserve its popularity. These arguments are all more or less nonsense. Studies have never conclusively shown any significant level of unreliability in the data, wikipedia is designed with its mutability in mind and accounts for it, sources are carefully tracked and bias and vandalism both are kept in check through a rather complex system of controls and social norms. Since its sources are clearly delineated with plenty of external links wikipedia provides numerous alternative resources for the knowledge hungry to go beyond wikipedia to learn more. And if you still have an issue with anything on wikipedia, it provides an open forum for users to discuss and argue and find out what others are thinking and disagree with you about and ultimately you can change it to the more accurate statement you know to be right. If you still have doubts about Wikipedia’s reliability, you can get a pretty balanced picture of it by reading wikipedia’s own article on the issue right here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia
But even if Wikipedia were significantly more unreliable than all other encyclopedias out there, it would still be something utterly extraordinary and worthy of praise. It is simply a more democratic institution than many other sources of knowledge. Everyone can access it, (who has an internet connection) easily and without cost. They can all participate in the discussion and the growth of it too. And it grows in the direction that the people actually want it to grow, not in the direction any small independent group of people says it ought to grow in. Topics that might seem irrelevant to the makers of Encyclopedia Britannica can get full airing on Wikipedia, taking their place in the grand scheme of human history. The breathe of information on wikipedia is just unimaginable, 8 million pages and 1.7 million full fledged articles in the english language alone. Approximately 7 million articles in 251 languages. And if you’ve spent any time reading wikipedia you know a lot of these articles are not small things at all. Some of them are simply huge.
We used to have an old set of Encyclopedias in my home. I remember, my parents got them because they thought they would be helpful for us in our education. They weren’t very. I was a very curious child and on occasion I would flip through an encyclopdia or look for something that I wanted to know in one. Inevitably I would not be able to find what I was looking for and I’d just get bored with it. The articles were uninteresting by and large and not particularly detailed. For projects I would have to go to the library to learn something meaningful about a subject matter, the encyclopedia might possibly just give me a few pictures to use or let me know something trivial like what a certain state’s flag looks like. I never got caught up in it. I never became fascinated with our encyclopedias. I never started to enjoy just reading articles in our encyclopedias just for the joy of reading them. They were more like ornamentation than a useful resource.
In contrast, I read Wikipedia all the time. Sometimes I’m just searching for something on the web and the wikipedia article is one of the first and best resources I find about it. Other times I go to wikipedia first when I am curious about something and want to learn a little more about some subject matter or phrase I heard in passing during a conversation or on the news or read in the book. Still other times in my spare time I just peruse wikipedia reading articles that meet my fancy and reading the discussions too and clicking on the sites linked to in the references and external links sections and learning more. More recently I’ve even started to peruse the many wiki spin off projects as well be it wikinews, wikiversity, or wikiquote and I find them all to be thoroughly enjoyable expenditures of my time. I’ve always been a huge fan of wikipedia, in fact I was quite a fan a number of projects the preceded it that were similar in nature. But wikipedia has just been to me one of the most extraordinary resources I’ve ever encountered. Its explosive growth, huge breathe and extraordinary reliability has made it one of those resources that make me wonder how it is that I ever once got along without it.
In a very real way wikipedia has already become a kind of base line knowledge for net dwellers to have. I talk to people on line, on forums and chats and on any subject of any depth in order for us to be talking the same “language” in a real sense we have to base our discussions on certain background facts and suppositions that we can get most readily from wikipedia articles. We supplement that knowledge from other resources and we sometimes dispute the claims asserted but in a sense if we didn’t have the wikipedia articles we’d just be talking right past each other, or we wouldn’t have the requisite pre-knowledge to even be able to speak intelligibly on the matter. This is the capacity in which wikipedia and resources like it raises the level of discussion on the internet and keeps us all on the same page. I have more than once been referred to the wikipedia article on a subject in a discussion and more often than not reading that article is very helpful and enables me to add more to the discussion than I otherwise would have. I have often quoted and referenced wikipedia articles on discussions as well in order to provide detail or clarification on some point.
Wikipedia isn’t the end of our learning, nor do we base all of our discussions solely on the facts found within. The internet is filled with far more and more in depth knowledge than you can get just from wikipedia and is growing ever more saturated with useful knowledge by the day. But Wikipedia does provide the basics of understanding in areas where we may have only had total ignorance prior to unearthing the article. Wikipedia spreads basic knowledge to the masses efficiently and effectively. This is really just a component of the massive effect of democratization of basic information wrought from the internet itself, but in a very real way I think of Wikipedia as the crowning jewel, the pivotal symbol of the internet’s triumph in this area.
So why the huge criticism of this site? Why do so many people hate it so? Why do even many of the wise and rational still speak with caution about this astounding resources and try to warn people off of it? I think it is for a very simple reason. Because our intuition tells us it shouldn’t work so well. The idea of open access and reliable knowledge is counterintuitive to us. We think an encyclopedia edited by “anyone” just can’t possibly work, so we look for the flaws and we hesitate to put any stake in it. We keep expecting it to prove to be unreliable and biased because we think of our fellow human beings, especially those that are stranger to us as so inherently unreliable and biased.
But wikipedia and many other collaborative projects break those expectations. They show them to be false and based on false assumptions. We can working together make something greater than what we individually could accomplish and we can do it for no other reason than our desire to do so, our urge to help out our fellow human beings and contribute to the future of human knowledge. Sometimes having the best and the greatest exclusive experts is less effective than having just large masses of people contributing whatever little bit of expertise and knowledge they can.
Still, do not think that I just flippantly dismiss all claims of both bias and inaccuracy in wikipedia. It does exist as it exists in virtually all other resources where you can find the same information in pretty much equal proportion. In fact I feel that it is the very fact that Wikipedia is so open and obvious about the likelihood of its having bias and and inaccuracies that is one of the things that makes it most useful as a vehicle for modern knowledge. It shouts at you “We are collaboratively edited!”, “Anyone can change this!”, “Don’t just take what you are reading at face value!” But of course this is the attitude you should really have about everything you read. You always should have had that attitude, but perhaps now even more than ever. It’s just that wikipedia makes sure you can’t forget it. Whereas other resources be it the New York Times or Encyclopedia Britannica claim to be in some fundamental way “the truth” making we readers every and again look the fool for trusting them when we find out that they are as flawed and unreliable as everything else, wikipedia puts on no such airs or pretensions. It is no more and no less than the truth as according to the many editors who happened to have chosen to write about it at the time. Don’t take their word for it. Read more and become certain. Wikipedia tells us hey these days you don’t trust your schools, your state, your police officers, your doctors, your lawyers, even your parents, but you rely on them all the same. So don’t trust wikipedia either, but feel free to rely on it if you choose. In this way a resource like Wikipedia makes us all better thinkers and learners if we are wise enough to treat it reasonably.
So block wikipedia from the internet will you? Well you might as well just turn off the damn thing altogether. Any internet that does not allow for open collaborative free institutions like wikipedia is not an internet I want anything to do with.
