So recently, (and to some extent repeatedly, over the last year or so) I’ve had the opportunity to discuss the merits of Wikipedia1 with ludimagist and others. As an academic, and in fact a sometimes professor, Meron seemed to have a great deal of problems with Wikipedia. As a borderline psychotic with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, I happen to love it.
Let me take you back to a simpler time. A time before the internet, a time before blogging and myspace and google. Let me take you back to the dawn of civilization. Let me take you back to 1981. I was but a wee lad of negro and chinaman descent, living in the ghetto. A hungry little boy with a runny nose, playing in the street as the cold wind blows, in the ghetto. Back then, if someone asked me a question or I was say, given a report to do on space, I couldn’t very well just go to the Encyclopedia Britannica. We didn’t have that in the hood. We had Funk & Wagnalls. And the answers to all questions were contained within. Many a school report was written by consulting Funk & Wagnalls. The problem is that all information contained within it was both heavilly editted and out of date having been published some 4 years earlier. Plus most ghetto families, being what they were, were missing a volume or two. Its not like anything important occured between LACE and MAOTS anyway. Fuck Volume 15!
But now we have Wikipedia. An enclopedia on the web. And its always up to date. Why? Because unlike the lame Funk & Wagnalls of the past, where if you wanted the 1983 edition instead of the 1977 edition you had to go over to your grandmothers, Wikipedia is updated all the time, because ANYONE can update it. So all of the really smart people in the world, who are can’t get dates because they are extremely annoying and pedantic can put all of that to use by self editting the worlds largest encyclopedia.
Since anyone can edit it, you of course end up with the problem that any piece of information is immediately suspect. If I want to be 4th in line of succession to the British Throne, the HOVAdammit, I’m only a quick edit away from anointing myself the Duke of York. And there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it. Well except of course, they’ll change it back.
My basic love of Wikipedia comes from this. Since the dateless contributors are constantly fighting back and forth to install their version of the truth in the wiki, eventually it reaches a sort of equilibrium of things that are kind of “true enough.” And I’m firmly of the opinion that true enough is usually good enough.
Meron pointed out that he wouldn’t let his students use wikipedia as a reference because of its obvious dubious reliability. But the thing is, I’m not writing academic papers. I haven’t had to write one in 8 years. Usually I don’t care so much about the intricate details of any given fact. I care about a cursory overview of the facts and what people at large think about the fact. Like Stephen Colbert says, Truthiness! It’s about thinking with your gut. It’s about truth. Not facts. Maybe Wikipedia gets some of the little details wrong here and there. Who cares. It just feels right. And at the end of the day pathos is so much more important than ethos.
The same can be said of the internet in general. When I want to know something, say, what the capital of Uganda is, I don’t really look it up anymore. I google it. And I just trust that the answer I get is right.
So that leads us to today’s question. Is Wikipedia a good idea? Do you go there when you need information? Do you trust it? What about the rest of the internet? How do you decide what’s trustworthy information and what’s not?
Also, if you haven’t voted in my hottest women poll (replacement for the original which I deleted), please do that too. I’m shutting it off tuesday night so get your votes in as soon as possible. And hey, get some of your friends to vote in it. I want a good sampling group.
1. For those not in the know, wikipedia is basically an online encyclopedia. A grand repository for all great knowledge of the universe. If you want to know about something, then wikipedia can probably tell you all there is to know about it. There is a small catch. One that’s barely even worth mentioning. The small catch is, it could be completely wrong.
I love wikipedia. Even if the information in the article is completely wrong, there’s always a huge argument about it on the discussion page, where you can figure out what the truth is by who’s making the fewest spelling errors.
Actually I find the articles themselves remarkably good, all things considered.
And more often than not, I’m not really seeking truth or accuracy. When I’m browsing Wikipedia (which I actually do fairly often) what I’m looking for is information. Bits of Knowledge(TM) to jam into my head, mix with other things, turn into ridiculous story ideas like the Pangboche Hand being the hand of Jesus, who lost it in a fight with a yeti during his “missing years” in the orient. The story’s called The Hand of God and it will be huge, just like the Da Vinci Code. With Jimmy Stewart!
And if I really need the truth, I can see whether there’s any disagreement on the discussion page, and do further research with google.
ok… I was gonna say, that the problem was that info that you find in wikipedia might not be there the next time you read, because I didn’t see anything about Jesus in the Pangboche Hand article. It took me til the 3rd time I read this to realize that you were saying that you came up with the idea that it was jesus’s hand, and not that that was an actual theory that I’d never heard.
Yeah, the Wikipedia people could never have figured this out. It takes an uncommon mind to think of these things.
clearly you should add it, so that future students can partake of your knowledge.
No, Dan Brown would just steal my idea.
see… that’s the problem. You’re greedy. It used to be about the wiki!
I’m not being greedy. Half the fun is figuring out for yourself why the Jesuits and Amish are breeding competing lake monsters in Vermont. I wouldn’t wanna deprive the kids of that.
but what about the poor unimaginative kids who never learn of such wonders?
They can watch TV.
right… but say they’re watching TV. And they notice something on TV like the manner in which Detective John Munch is on Law and Order: SVU and had a cameo in Arrested Development. So they start to wonder how a character from an NBC show could end up on a Fox show. Then they will go look it up on Wikipedia and discover that Munch actually comes from Homicide: Life on the Streets and not either of those other shows at all. And if one absorbs that, one will eventually make his way to the Tommy Westphall Universe and essentially learn that 90% of American Televsion series all take place in the same universe. And think of the possibilities that lends!
Reading the Tommy Westphall discussion reminds me of the other reason not to put my Jesus v. Yeti theory up there. No Original Research. They explicitly disallow ideas like mine, regardless of how brilliant or obviously true.
And I refuse to believe that This is Spinal Tap takes place in the same universe as Alf.
I recently finished Foucault’s Pendulum.
Dan Brown isn’t fit to wipe Umberto Eco’s dog’s behind.
Re: I recently finished Foucault’s Pendulum.
I’ve never read Dan Brown, but I am nonetheless inclined to agree.
I haven’t read Dan either, but why do I need to? There’s wikipedia!
I’m a fan of wikipedia. The only thing it’s bad for is, as you say, writing academic papers. And even for that, as long as you never use it as a source, per se, it’s fine to read the article. You can use it to dig into other avenues that you might find not otherwise have known were related, perhaps. It’ll give you the broad overview before you dig into details. It’s a good tool.
right, that’s kind of one of the things I was getting at. Its really just as good as any other encyclopedia. In fact better, since its more up to date. Funk & Wagnalls, or Britannica or whatever really shouldn’t be your only source when you’re writing your report on space anyway.
Unless you are in 3rd grade. If you are in 3rd grade and writing a report about space, you can use an encyclopædia.
even then its kinda silly though. What’s the point? Honestly I think 3rd grade papers are silly in general. It’s not like you’re actually forming any opinions about anything. Now that I think about it, teachers back then used to get upset if you used an encyclopedia for your research. Exactly what is the 3rd grade paper supposed to be proving anyway?
I remember using an encyclopedia for those reports, but always using some other book. Because we had books back then, and people read them. The encyclopedia didn’t really have all that much information in it, just kind of an overview.
We do have our (6th-8th grade) kids write social studies and science reports, and they have to use 3 different kinds of sources (web, book, and I don’t recall what else, maybe encyclopedia isn’t a book, I don’t know).
I use it. Even for academic purposes. However, in those cases, my main purpose is to get a basic idea of the topic, and check their outside links to get more info. I also check the discussion pages to get an idea of what parts of the page are under suspicion. Generally, though, the pages on biochemistry/bioengineering tend to be pretty accurate. For the most part, people don’t bother posting on those pages if they don’t know what they’re talking about, and you’re not going to be getting wikigraffiti over there. (Really, who the fuck cares enough to mess with an explanation on matrix-associated laser desorption ionization mass spectroscopy.)
The problem I generally have is that I can use Web of Science to find journal articles on whatever topic, but I’m going to be getting specific information on tiny minutiae within that topic. In the case of MALDI-MS, I had to look it up to find out what the damn acronym meant. Minutiae don’t help me – I need an overview. For that, Wikipedia is perfect.
All of that said, I _never_ use Wikipedia to look up anything related to current events. People are just too likely to want “their” version of events to be recorded for posterity, without disclosing their innate biases.
EFIL 4 SM-IDLAM!
Bitchez!
uh… yeah…
as for current events, I don’t know that I think its useless. Its just not authoratative. Especially in the very near term. Say a US Senator is assassinated. 5 min. later, the news would be all over the internet. Wikipedia will have the story. Granted there will be some mistakes, like, probably some people will report it wrong and it’ll be the president. Others will report it wrong and it will be the entire Capitol building blowing up. But within the hour, that should mostly calm down and we’d have the basic facts right. And in the meantime, the sociological game of telephone is pretty interesting too. If you want absolute facts, use google news. And in the near term, that’s going to be skewed too.
Obviously, I picked a very exaggerated example. But look at any real story. Katrina coverage, War in Iraq, NSA wire-tapping, whatever. Any newspaper is going to have a slant one way or the other. Wikipedia is interesting because its slant is always moving. Did Bush do something illegal with wiretapping? It doesn’t really matter in the long run. What matters is whether the US people believe he did or not. I find that in general wikipedia is a pretty reasonable barometer for that sort of thing.
Why does “truthiness” link to http://www.sexydesktop.co.uk/index.htm?
it was a by product of the same mistake that caused me to accidentally erase the other post. Namely, I copy one post to make the second. Anyway, its been fixed now.
Oh, I wasn’t saying you should fix it.
I love wikipedia. I read articles there probably at least every other day. I correct grammar/diction errors when I see them. I would have to say that I inherently trust it unless something seems fishy.
Wikipedia is one of my favorite places to look at pictures of things (say, animals and plants) with my son. They have some great photos there.
At this point I don’t know what I would do without wikipedia, so I’d have to say it is a good idea.
I probably read at least one thing in wikipedia a day. A lot of times I don’t even go to google first anymore. If I’m ever wondering about some piece of trivia or history or whatever (and this happens a lot), its nice to just be able to go there and look it up.
Wiwkpedia r00les. Yeah, if you’re writing a paper on space, you shouldn’t use it as a source, but that’s mainly because it’s not useful as a source, not because it’s not authoritative. If you want authority, use primary sources and introduce your own bias, as opposed to using Britannica or Encarta or Wikipedia and using somebody else’s.
yeah. My point is, in reality I never actually write academic papers these days. If I did, I’d want actual books and stuff. Usually I just want to know a little something about something… encylopedias in general are great for that. Wikipedia is awesome for that.
I, too, love wikipedia, though it has led me astray in the past. For academic research, I depend more heavily on citeseer.
example of a lead astrayness?
I am told that the space cost estimate for Bloom filters is wrong (wikipedia substantially overstates the cost). But I haven’t verified this for myself, so I haven’t corrected it.
(Though wikipedia’s math jives with this calculator, so it may well be correct and my colleague is wrong…)
My professional experience — I’m a linguist — has been that when I find a conflict between an “expert” source and Wikipedia, if I go and talk to a native speaker in person, nine times out of ten, Wikipedia was right.
So, I’m all for it.
hmmm… ok, I find that incredibly interesting. Can you give me an example of when that happened?
(by the way, I assume you came back for the results of the hottest women poll… they are forthcoming, I’m just giving people a little longer to vote… I was an idiot and wiped out the original post, with all the comments – luckily I had scored all of them already)
Honestly, I’m having trouble remembering the precise details of which languages and references were involved. (I deal with 50+ languages in more than 15 different scripts.) I know that on a few separate occasions, I’ve had one of the books in my shelf, or an “expert” web resource (like Omniglot, or one of the various translation firms or font vendors), give a slightly different character inventory for a language than what Wikipedia listed, and upon talking with somebody who actually knows the language, it would always turn out that Wikipedia was right. Either there would’ve been some spelling reform in the past couple decades, or the “expert” is including a presently-deprecated character that was at some time been used for foreign loanwords, or something like that. IIRC, Albanian and Portuguese had examples of that. (European Portuguese has phased out use of ü, so probably that was the implicated character.) If you were paying me for my time, I’d go dig into my notes and find the details on a few more examples. *g*
I like Wikipedia and am certainly willing to accept it as a source. The information on Wikipedia is certainly more accurate than the information on some random website created by someone like me. Moreover, it is more up to date than whatever encyclopedia is in our school library (quite possibly the World Book because we are only the quasi-hood).
As for the dubious accuracy, I have to disagree, because 1) as you said, dateless wankers change it back and 2) archived versions are kept on the site. One day I was looking up “Cinderella” on Wikipedia, as I was planning a unit of instruction. The link totally went somewhere non-Cinderelly. So I just accessed the previous version of the page. Granted I’m not wiki-wise enough to change it back (I’ve had two dates this year; I simply haven’t had the time!) but I got the information I needed. While I don’t expect 7th graders to know how to find the previous version of a page, I would hope college students could figure it out.
Finally, Wikipedia contains links to other sites, which might be acceptable to someone who requires a static representation of knowledge in our fast-changing world.
Mostly though, I just let my ADD run wild on Wikipedia. I think it might make an interesting lesson, to see which links students followed if I started them all at the same place. Then again, I would have to check if *certain* pages were filtered out.
and then i thought on it some more
Wikipedia is acceptable to those who accept the postmodern nature of knowledge, that there is no ‘one truth’ which is out there and can be known. Wikipedia recognizes that knowledge is socially constructed and that the common perception of reality becomes reality.
There, that ought to piss someone off.
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Dammit, are you trying to make me not like wikipedia?
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Oh the contrary. I’m explaining why you like it.
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Hmph. Maybe here needs to be a wikipedia entry about me, wherein my distaste for postmodernism is made clear.
I also hate pineapples.
Re: and then i thought on it some more
You’re gonna have to explain that. I find that people who don’t like pineapples usually don’t understand them fully. Ditto on the postmodernism.
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What’s to understand? They touch my taste buds, and I cringe, have an extremely unpleasant sensation in my mouth, and don’t want to taste them anymore.
As for postmodernism, it leaves the very idea of a full understanding impossible, which is why I have little use for it. I have waded through vast amounts of gibberish to come to this conclusion. Feel free to attempt to persuade me otherwise (though this might not be the best forum).
Re: and then i thought on it some more
While we may never agree on the delectable yumminess of pineapple, we do on pomo. I have plenty of use for postmodernism for the same reason you have little use for it.
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Oh, I see. Okay. The meaningless nonsense I’m okay with. It’s when the meaningless nonsense is “clever” or somesuch that I start wanting to knock people’s hats off.
Re: and then i thought on it some more
I don’t know what you mean by “meaningless nonsense” (and I will pause to wonder if this sentence is a logical impossibility).
I also have doubts as to the feasibility of full understanding. Of anything. But since everyone reads the text of the universe from a different perspective, I would say that if you interviewed everyone on the planet about everything, you could have a full understanding of everything. It might take a while though. I think Wikipedia is a more efficient means of doing the same thing even though it does select out people without computers.
Re: and then i thought on it some more
I would say that if you interviewed everyone on the planet about everything, you could have a full understanding of everything.
I don’t think so. At best you’d have a full understanding of how people perceive things. Missing would be (a full understanding of) what they’re actually perceiving, and why they perceive it the way they do.
However in most cases it’s probably possible to get a “good enough” understanding and I think Wikipedia might be great for that.
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eh its a fine forum… I am the the graffiti board of the new millenium. And besides… I’m a comment addict.
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Me too, but I’m in withdrawal. I apparently need to post better rants so people will get in 9058-comment discussions on my LJ.
Re: and then i thought on it some more
Wikipedia recognizes that knowledge is socially constructed and that the common perception of reality becomes reality.
I think I’d be okay with this if it went: “Wikipedia recognizes that knowledge is socially constructed and therefore often wrong, because people are morons.”
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But that’s the wonder of it! Wikipedia is socially constructed, and it isn’t wrong. Or if it is, it isn’t wrong for very long.
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see, I’m with Katherine here (I think). Socially constructed knowledge isn’t wrong. It simply is. I’ll grant you that there are some solid facts about the universe. The earth revolves around the sun, for instance. But those facts are pretty useless in day to day life. The fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west (an optical illusion, but one share and considered a given by most of the human race) is a far more useful piece of knowedge.
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I didn’t say it’s necessarily wrong, just that it often is.
Hmm. Could give an elaborate response, but I think I’m really in need of sleep. Maybe tomorrow.
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So the sun rising in the east and setting in the west is perfectly true for its frame of reference. But it’s not consensus reality that makes it so. There is an actual Thing and it behaves in a certain Way and does so regardless of what ideas society constructs. The socially constructed reality is a reflection of the real reality, not the other way around.
For example, if you took a poll in 65,000,000 B.C., and asked the question, “Are there rocks floating around in the sky that might one day smash into the ground, killing you and your entire family and wiping out 90% of the species on earth and making way for those little ugly furry things to dominate the world?” People would think you were nuts. But the asteroid hits anyway.
So I don’t disagree that the social constructs are often right (or close enough anyway) or that they’re often more useful. But Katherine’s formulation says socially constructed knowledge “becomes reality” and it doesn’t.
Re: and then i thought on it some more
It depends on what you mean by reality. To hijack your example, in 65,000,000 B.C., the commonly known version of reality was, “No there are not rocks floating around in the sky that might one day smash into the ground, killing you and your entire family and wiping out 90% of the species on earth and making way for those little ugly furry things to dominate the world.” People believed this to be so. The best authority at the time said it was so, and it was reality. Okay, fine, they were wrong, but now they’re all dead, and never got the change to know that they were wrong.
Since The Facts As We Know Them™ are constantly changing with new discoveries, we are only as good as our last update. For a while it was reality that the sun revolved around the earth. Anyone could see that. It was reality. Then some dude came along and said it wasn’t so, and everyone got in a tizzy about it. But now we accept that as reality. Reality is a group hallucination. A convincing one that our “science” seems to “prove” – but it’s a science we designed within the confines of that which we believe to be reality.
Re: and then i thought on it some more
For a while it was reality that the sun revolved around the earth. Anyone could see that. It was reality.
See, to me that’s not reality. That’s just people’s idea of reality.
but it’s a science we designed within the confines of that which we believe to be reality.
Yes, but that which we believe to be reality is informed by what is actually real. Because our understanding of it is imperfect doesn’t make it less so. You can’t have a group hallucination without first having a group to hallucinate.
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See, to me that’s not reality. That’s just people’s idea of reality.
I don’t see how it’s possible to distinguish the two.
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it isn’t. Certainly not on a globalsocio path…
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The fact that we lack the tools to distinguish them does not make them the same thing. We have the ability to take our own limitations into account when constructing our mental models of reality. If we fail to do so, and take our representations as the real thing, we’re just fooling ourselves.
Re: and then i thought on it some more
How can you be sure?
How do you know that we lack the tools to distinguish reality from our perceptions of it?
How do you know that we don’t now know the real true reality?
Re: and then i thought on it some more
I can’t be sure, that’s my whole point. Neither can you 🙂
We have no point of reference from which to compare our perceptions with the real thing. We can get different perspectives from other people, but leaving aside any dishonesty or poor communication skills on their part, then all we have is our perceptions of their perspectives.
So why take the view that there is a reality outside our perceptions? A few reasons.
1) Solipsism is lonely
2) “There is no universal truth” is a contradictory, logically flawed statement. Now, I’m all for acknowledging the limits of reason (which ties in to my contention that we can’t fully understand reality) but when you rest your argument on this statement, it removes your credibility. If you don’t believe what you’re saying is true, what possible reason could I have for doing so? Because most people agree with you? Why should I care?
On the other hand, if there is a universal truth, then I am open to arguments, because I don’t want to be wrong. I will seek common ground, I will try to understand your perspective, I will listen to you because I want my model to be a more accurate reflection of reality. I might even come to accept views that I dislike. If consensus becomes reality, I don’t have to do any of that. I just have to shout louder, construct arguments that sound good, impress you with big words and blinking lights. Or just build a mind-control device.
Re: and then i thought on it some more
While you chose to focus on the “truth” part of “universal truth,” I focus on the “universal” part of it. That is to say that I have my truth that works for me. I recognize it doesn’t work for others, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
In your model, well, maybe you don’t want to be wrong and you are open to arguments. But there do seem to be an awful lot of people who operate in your model who believe they are right and are not open to arguments. My model allows me to say, “Okay, enjoy that,” and walk away from fanatics, fundies, schizophrenics, and poopooheads.
Re: and then i thought on it some more
But there do seem to be an awful lot of people who operate in your model who believe they are right and are not open to arguments.
My model is not nearly as popular as I’d like it to be. What these guys are missing is the key ingredient that it’s not possible to know what the universal truth is. When people assume they’ve got it, then yeah, there are problems. However your model is casting all these folks as fanatics, fundies, schizophrenics, and poopooheads, and if you’re honest with yourself I don’t think you’ll find that you actually approve of their ideas as truths having as much validity as yours.
I recognize it doesn’t work for others, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
But if your truth doesn’t apply to me, I’m not compelled to try and understand it. I might try to a point, but if it doesn’t make some headway quickly, I’m likely to just stick to my own truth. I think this leads to more walking away and less understanding.
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However your model is casting all these folks as fanatics, fundies, schizophrenics, and poopooheads, and if you’re honest with yourself I don’t think you’ll find that you actually approve of their ideas as truths having as much validity as yours.
They are welcome to their ideas so long as they do not force them on other people or go around screaming at people and beating people up for thinking differently. It is forcing your ideas on someone else that makes you a poopoohead.
I’m not compelled to try and understand it.
As a general rule, I’m not into compelling people.
Yes, this does make my professional life difficult, but it works for my personal life. Some random person doesn’t wanna understand me? Fine. Doesn’t bother me.
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But they’re not welcome to those ideas which require them to beat people up for thinking differently. So some ideas are better than others.
Some random person doesn’t wanna understand me? Fine. Doesn’t bother me.
I’m all for avoiding conflict as much as possible, and in general I’m happy to let people believe what they want. But if someone (conscientiously adhering to his own truth) is doing something that’s hurting me, I need to be able to make a compelling argument that he shouldn’t do that (and I can’t do that honestly unless I believe my point of view is superior, i.e. closer to an unknown truth which applies to us both). Maybe he’ll listen and maybe he won’t, but he should at least have the opportunity. There are only so many places I can walk away to.
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So some ideas are better than others.
The idea of beating people up is generally a bad one, IMO. But deciding to beat people up based on the fact that they hold different ideas from you is not the fault of the ideas.
In any case, I don’t see how you can convince anyone that your point of view is closer to The Truth if they believe that their idea is closer to The Truth.
At least you don’t resort to veiled insults and imply that only people who agree with you are smart. I consider that kind of behavior equivalent to fundamentalism.
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The idea of beating people up is generally a bad one, IMO. But deciding to beat people up based on the fact that they hold different ideas from you is not the fault of the ideas.
It is if beating people up for that reason is part of the idea. And there are plenty of ideas like that (although I guess they normally prefer “kill” to “beat up.”)
In any case, I don’t see how you can convince anyone that your point of view is closer to The Truth if they believe that their idea is closer to The Truth.
It’s not easy. It requires that people be open to the possibility, however remote, that they’re wrong. Maybe most people aren’t able to do this, but if you neve give them the chance, they’ll never surprise you.
It’s probably pretty rare that one person convinces the other completely, but I think it frequently happens that each person comes away with an expanded point of view that is closer to the Truth than the ones they held previously.
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for the record, this is a point of reference thing. If the universe is truly infinite, then any point could be picked as its center. The earth revolves around the sun because looking from an arbitrary point outside of our solar system, 9 objects are revolving around one other larger one. But lacking other markers, and just taking into account two objects, the earth and the sun, it is impossible to say which object is revolving around which.
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I’m not sure what your point is. We aren’t lacking other markers. Still, I don’t wanna be nitpicky about who revolves around who. I’m just saying there are real things doing this thing we call “revolving” and they do what they do regardless of what we call it or how well we understand it or whether or not we’re even aware of it.
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point being that its not so simple as saying its revolving. The very concept of revolution only matters in reference to an observer. I believe there is some corollary to relativity that explains it better than I could ever hope to. *shrug*
The point is, truths are seldom universal. Certainly not the interesting ones. Generally perspective has a lot to do with it. And perspective is colored by perception, especially mob perception. Are we the good guys or the bad guys in Iraq? It all depends on who you ask.
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The existence of contradictory perspectives does not make impossible a third point of view from which they both make sense. It’s the discovery of this third point of view that I think is being impeded when we assign too much truthiness value to the mob perception.
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doesn’t piss me off. Consensus reality is more important than fact. That was my hypothesis in the first place.
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Yay! I have a pomo ally!
This is *EXTREMELY* inaccurate, because I know girls who I think are hotter in real life, and of course anyone on the cover of Maxim can be made up to be hotter (and probably is, I just don’t recognize their names). But these are the girls that leave me with the fuzziest adolescent memories.
Angelina Jolie
Jeri Ryan
Jenny McCarthy
Jolene Blalock (T’Pol on Star Trek Enterprise. Not kidding.)
Carmen Electra
Paris Hilton
Pamela Anderson
Brianna Banks
Jessica Alba
Jennifer Love Hewitt
Denise Richards
Natalie Portman
and you have been tabulated (even if you did comment on the wrong one). I was gonna post results tonight, but there’s still a couple people I’m waiting to hear from, and I’m too tired right now anyway. So if you want to invite someone else to vote you’re still welcome to. So long as they do it soon.
But check back sometime tomorrow night or wednesday morning for the results.
Collaboration (and the driving force behind it) is a rather broad topic, too broad for this post. I’ll just say that because Wiki is created by collaborative efforts, it is reflective of our society. If 90% of people were irresponsible pranksters, this would be a very common occurrence. But it isn’t. I would trust Wiki as much as I would trust the directions given to me by a stranger on the street: follow them up to a point, and if the information is not confirmed, ask someone else.
But I do use Wiki. It is not quotable in an academic paper, but it always provides enough references that do result in information supported by real facts and publications. Its condensed nature eliminates the need to look for references all over the Internet.
I find that Google is more convenient for looking up interesting tidbits (I use the keyword define a lot). But Wiki links often come up on the first page of Google results anyway.
the stranger and directios anology is a very good one.
I guess I should check in as well
It’s funny, I had a few RL discussions about this recently. My own experience, which fits into the general consensus, is that when I read articles on subjects that I have researched extensively I find them to be full of errors.
Lately I’m fairly invested in historiography and archival research, niether of which Wikipedia is any good for. Last semester when I saw it in the bibliography of a conference paper and told one of my favorite profs about it h nearly went into shock. I don’t know of any serious scholar who would write a Wikipedia entry, and if they did I doubt it would have any place on an academic CV.
At the moment I’m actually contracted to write a couple encyclopedia articles for an academic press. The fact checking and editing that I have to go through is pretty intense, and this is by experts, not by random people on the internet.
I know you said you don’t need to write academic papers (though you will if you do go back to grad school), but what it comes down to is trusting experts vs. trusting hobbyists. If you’re reading up on Harry Potter fandom, by all means go for it, in that case the hobbyists are the experts and there is not all that much that is “information” as such. I see it as a sort of “folk knowledge.” Many of the entries on theater look like they were written by excited undergrads who just took their first history course and are still regurgitating myths, and a lot of the martial arts entries look like their primary source of information was Black Belt magazine.
I have used it to look up the rules of Yut when I was given a set as a gift, but I wouldn’t look at it if I were about to give a lecture on Commedia del Arte, except maybe to refresh myself on some of the common misconceptions.
You make a case that sounding informed is more important than being informed, while I know you’re (sorta) joking (thank you Mr. Colbert), I also know that if you actually wanted accurate information you would make a serious effort to look for it.
For a few more viewpoints, there was a discussion in my journal about this a while ago that’s here:
http://ludimagist.livejournal.com/194285.html
That linked to this discussion that I started here:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/academics_anon/891519.html
Re: I guess I should check in as well
Actually, I don’t mean to make that case at all really. Maybe slightly in jest. My real point is more along the lines of what Katherine is discussing back and forth with Max in comments above. That being the post-modern definition of knowledge. It’s not about sounding smart. If it was, we’d just use lots of big words and not care what they meant. It’s about having an understanding of what society at large considers the truth to be, which for most (maybe not all) practical purposes is somewhere between indistinguishable from and better than the truth anyway.
those who believe absurdities tend to commit atrocities
Yeah, I looked through that discussion too. Max is wise.
What’s the practical purpose you want to use the information for?
Using what “society at large” considers to be true is useful in politics and advertising, and maybe as a study in anthropology. We can invade a country or try to exterminate or subjugate a people based on the opinions of “society at large.”
I like to be optimistic and assume that the average educated adult knows not to believe everything they read. I am not so optimistic as to think that they won’t believe the things that they want to believe even if they’re ridiculous.
Something like Wikipedia serves to let people write what they want to be true and present it as authoritative. In some cases it doesn’t really matter as the stakes are not all that high. People don’t generally live or die based on movie fandoms. But if someone were to look for legal advice on there, or medical advice, then we have some problems.
When you’re talking “society at large,” you’re mostly talking about a lot of people not as smart as you. When you’re talking about the people who respond to you here, it’s more of an intellectual peer group which has a diverse enough knowledge base to be able to spot innaccuracy if you did repeat it.
Now, to some extent this isn’t even completely about Wikipedia as it is about encyclopedias in general. That’s a (very modernist) genre with all kinds of issues, both good and bad. There was a study recently that came to the conclusion that Wikipedia was slightly more accurate than Brittanica. This is not a credit to Wikipedia so much as a slam on Brittanica. I would question any assignment handed in to me that used any general encyclopedia as a primary source. We’re back into general vs. specific knowledge again. If someone used The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, that would be somewhat more acceptable, but then it’s much more about a place to start than a place to end.
So yeah, the question is really what use you have in mind for what you read. You’re not writing for society at large. Not on here anyway. So why give their consensus any priviledge?
a couple recent articles on this topic, just for the record
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=11109
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17wiki.html?ex=1152072000&en=251453aeead11c97&ei=5070