Despite its many innovations, Wikipedia is still a very traditional encyclopedia, following a pattern that was laid down in the late 1700’s by Diderot and others. Each article summarizes a particular topic, discusses details and provides references. Each article is a linear discourse that starts at beginning and reaches a conclusion about the topic, which in wikipedia is termed “consensus.”
The problem is that there can be only one consensus (as they said in Highlander) . One of the biggest criticisms of Wikipedia is that its articles are not accurate. Accordingto wiktionary, accuracy means “…exact or careful conformity to the truth...” Since everyone has a different view of what is true and false, by definition every article in Wikipedia is inaccurate.
It turns out that this is nothing new. Encyclopedias have been controversial since the very beginning. For instance, the encyclopedists in eighteenth century France were considered to be radicals, distorting the truth in order to weaken the might of the catholic church and the monarchy.
Wikipedia proponents feel that it harnesses the “wisdom of the masses” in order to optimize the truth of articles. On the other hand, critics could claim it optimizes the truthiness of articles.
I believe the biggest problem with Wikipedia is the encyclopedia format itself because most interesting topics defy consensus. Take my original example of the American War of 1812: was it the result of upstart United States taking advantage of Britain’s preoccupation with Napolean or was it U.S. finally fighting back after years of oppression? The answer is “yes to both.” You might argue that a skillful writer can illustrate both viewpoints in a single article, but that is an over-simplification. Even seemingly objective areas such biology and physics can be fantastically controversial.
Why does Wikipedia need to be like this? Is Wikipedia an anachronism; an eighteenth century idea repacked as a modern day internet phenomenon? What would happen if Wikipedia somehow removed the imperative for consensus, instead embracing and requiring differing viewpoints? It certainly would no longer fit the established pattern of an encyclopedia, but perhaps that pattern is no longer useful.
I’ll conclude with a quote about history and historians from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book 11 (which I am reading and enjoying right now):
The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century in Europe present an extraordinary movement of millions of people. Men leave their customary pursuits, hasten from one side of Europe to the other, plunder and slaughter one another, triumph and are plunged in despair, and for some years the whole course of life is altered and presents an intensive movement which first increases and then slackens. What was the cause of this movement, by what laws was it governed? asks the mind of man.
The historians, replying to this question, lay before us the sayings and doings of a few dozen men in a building in the city of Paris, calling these sayings and doings “the Revolution”; then they give a detailed biography of Napoleon and of certain people favorable or hostile to him; tell of the influence some of these people had on others, and say: that is why this movement took place and those are its laws.
But the mind of man not only refuses to believe this explanation, but plainly says that this method of explanation is fallacious, because in it a weaker phenomenon is taken as the cause of a stronger. The sum of human wills produced the Revolution and Napoleon, and only the sum of those wills first tolerated and then destroyed them.
“But every time there have been conquests there have been conquerors; every time there has been a revolution in any state there have been great men,” says history. And, indeed, human reason replies: every time conquerors appear there have been wars, but this does not prove that the conquerors caused the wars and that it is possible to find the laws of a war in the personal activity of a single man. Whenever I look at my watch and its hands point to ten, I hear the bells of the neighboring church; but because the bells begin to ring when the hands of the clock reach ten, I have no right to assume that the movement of the bells is caused by the position of the hands of the watch.
Entries (RSS)
June 11th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
“What would happen if Wikipedia somehow removed the imperative for consensus, instead embracing and requiring differing viewpoints?”
Interesting question. Trying to envision what this would look like, the first thing that comes to mind is Yahoo Answers. Imagine a question like “What was the War of 1812?” followed by a slew of answers, each with their own take on the war, where the community then votes for their favorite replies. Instead of a single source of truth, you could end up with a handful of the most popular “truths”.
What Wikipedia provides that Y! Answers doesn’t though, is the collaborative aspect, where multiple authors can revise the same article. Maybe in this case, we take a page from the open source model of software development, where an author can submit a “revision” to an “answer” (like submitting a patch), which the author can then choose to accept or reject. If the author rejects it, the submitter can instead choose to “fork” the original answer. Just brainstorming here, but maybe it will trigger something. :)