Wikipedia and finding truth
Ryan brings up the Wikipedia quality issue that's been buzzing around lately, and runs smack into the real problem - after noting, via Dave Winer, that everyone has an equal voice on the Wiki, we get to this as the solution:
Identify people who have expertise or knowledge on certain subjects
That's harder than you might think - and it all depends on the subject. I find that Wikipedia is pretty good on historical subjects (at least older ones), and that's because any controversy that may have existed on the subject has passed. For instance - look up Julius Caesar - the history reveals that there have been a number of reversions lately, but the general information looks pretty good - the damage on that page is the garden variety "I'm excited by curse words" sort of damage.
Now have a look at something more recent, and more contentious - the 2000 US Presidential election. Go browse the blogosphere if you think that there's anything resembling consensus on how that went down. I can't see there being a fully objective view of something as controversial as that election for a long time - it wasn't until deep into the 20th century that the 1876 election was viewed with any objectivity, for instance.
So back to the expertise question - how does a "real" encyclopedia deal with this problem any better than Wikipedia does? Take any controversial topic for which varying interpretations exist (i.e., nearly any historical event that happened within the last 100 years) - where do you find experts who have "unassailable knowledge" of some event? The bottom line is, you don't. Let's take a subject I've read a fair bit about recently - WWI. It's long enough ago now that some level of objectivity is creeping in - but it's still colored by subsequent events (WWII, the Cold War) - enough to generate controversy. What's definitive?
And that's just five books I've read on the subject - five books with very different discussions of how (and why) the war was fought. Let's take the encyclopedia up now - how does the entry on WWI address the war? How does it explain the hows and whys? I'll tell you how - it uses the (then current) academic consensus. Is that "correct" in any abstract sense? Who knows? It might be - or it might not be. The reality is, even WWI is still too controversial for there to be a reliable "consensus" view. Which means that the entry - whether it's in printed copy or bits - is just going to be some compromise view.
Exactly how does that differ for Wikipedia and any other work? It doesn't. The reality is, having "anyone" be able to edit doesn't mean that "everyone" will. Most people don't care deeply about any particular subject - the ones with an interest (and, of course, the vandals) will be the ones who show up. With the printed encyclopedia, anyone who's views fall outside the current academic consensus will just get cut out immediately. With Wikipedia, they have a chance to get their take peer reviewed and commented on.
Which leads me to the opposite view from Winer, and Ryan, and most other people - I'll take the Wikipedia approach over the standard. It's far more likely to allow a larger set of views fight it out.
Comments
[XCheck] October 19, 2005 10:19:15.000
Jim, this is a great post It just shows that we (as a species, I guess) should "agree to disagree".
I wonder how it translates into the excutive sphere (governments). Since we are bound to have controversy, what's the best strategy to lead a nation, for example? Not that I have an answer...
As I said - fantastic post. Keep on bloggin'
Wikipedia on DKBTrace
[ David Buck] October 20, 2005 7:13:16.000
Comment by David Buck
The Wikipedia entry for DKBTrace used to claim that it was written for Unix and the last version was released in 1989.
I corrected it to say that it was originally written for the Amiga and was last released in 1991. I know that the incorrect 1989 date came from a document where I had earlier mis-remembered the date. As for why it said it was written for Unix, I have no idea.
In this case, the entry was incorrect until I edited it. My feeling is that I can't really trust information on wikipedia. The information may actually be correct, but there isn't the same burden of research and accuracy that normal encyclopedias have.
[Ryan Lowe] October 20, 2005 18:49:17.519
Identifying people who have expertise can be straightforward in certain situations. For example, if I want to know when a band is playing a concert the best source is the band itself. The members of the band are the experts, whereas everyone else is getting information second-hand, like from the band's website. If you're trying to write an objective article on a subject, then of course things get more argumentative. How could an article ever be completely objective? How could is possibly cover all angles and all backstory? It cannot because situations often have too many external influences (wars are a great example of that) that cannot be explained in a limited amount of space. My main point about Wikipedia's downside was not its article quality (though some articles are quite good, it's debatable overall) but how easily a wiki can be vandalized. The time between the error and the fix is when the article is, without question, incorrect. It's the ease at which wiki's can be vandalized, especially in subtle and subversive ways, that at any given moment in time makes Wikipedia a poor academic resource. For this reason, in my books it will never be a real encyclopedia. It's a great secondary resource though.