When You Reach Your Carousel

So anyway I was hanging out over at oxfordgirl's end of the woods (it's cool, they have parties there and also outbursts of hate) and there was some talk about wikipedia. I started posting a reply and then I got caught up in it, and before you know it I was back on my live-journal posting a post which having just checked my clock takes me an hour to do (I'm editing now, this is the future, what you are about to read is in the past already, all the tenses are wrong).

Purely coincidently, I have just spent - Christ is it really four hours - on wikipedia. Am spending rather as I haven't quite finished yet. I didn't mean to. I was reading up on Clint Eastwood directed movies and then I got snared by Jonestown Massacre. Then before I could finish an innocent alt-tab lead me to think examine I was actually doing.

Is it healthy to unconsciously treat wikipedia as equally reliable when chuckling at the nostalgia evoked by the episode guide to Coupling, or following chains of thought regarding Galactus as Great Old One, or considering the causes of the Jonestown massacre or the global civil rights movement, or the facts of the San Francisco trial of Dan White?

It's hard for wikipedia to get "facts" about milk or the shape of an oxygen molecule wrong. It doesn't really matter in the larger scale if they misrepresent the plot of a novel or I disagree with their comments about Wuthering Heights. Does it matter any more what their bias is on neurolinguistics or the biography of Canadian science-fiction author Margaret Atwood, or the events at Mai Lai on March 16, 1968?

Wikipedia is lazyweb at its finest. I can follow links to other sites if I want to but why should I? Surely all the information I need is laid out there neatly and in well-punctuated paragraphs. Other peoples' websites are often messy or have been constructed by people who think "magenta" is a suitable colour for text.

Will I ever crack a reference book about Jonestown? Probably not. I'm just too lazy and superficial for academia (which is why I made such a bad showing when I was there). I assume that the wikipedia entries on the Guyyana events have been written by responsible people who know what they are talking about and have tried to reduce bias. But have they? Are they? How can I check without going to the reference books, and in that case why not go to the reference books first and damn the easy-access narcotic with its pictures and easy navigation sidebar? Am I fundamentally any different from the sound-bite zombies I claim to despise?

Well yes. I think I can answer that one. Wikipedia might be an unreliable source of information but in most of the cases I've consulted it for anything more complex that the origin of Chicken Kiev it's been cross-referenced, and has appeared reasonably balanced or at least sufferd from a bias obvious enough not to confuse me. I've spent a happy hour or three poking at any number of topics. It hasn't made me an expert, and I'm self-aware enough to know that, but it has without a doubt improved my understanding of the world (albeit in a small way) in a way that watching the television news has not and almost certainly will not.

Without wikipedia I would know nothing about Jonestown at all apart from the "fact" that the Reverend Jimmy Jones fed a load of people cyandie in the cool-aid and they all died. I think I got that from a throw-away reference in a Stephen King novel (or was it Peter Straub) and maybe a pop song.

And on the third (or fourth) hand, I am keenly aware of the kind of intellectual paralysis that comes over me when I consider how much I don't know about. I'm not denigrating those people who can sit and read a three volume discussion on the Vietnam war, far from it. I recognize that the only way I could create even a mildly pure understanding of any event would be for me to dedicate the rest of my life to tracking down and reading primary historical sources. But even thats a road fraught with misinterpretation, bias and prejudice. Without the use of some sort of magical time-machine-cum-mind-reading-hat, I do not believe that I can ever know the actual truth behind anything, anywhere, ever.

Somewhere along the line I have to trust somebody else. Is the historian who writes the well-researched text-book any different to the historian who writes the well-researched wikipedia entry? For that matter is the holocaust denier who writes the pseudo-history that he passes off as fact and different or more dangerous if he writes on paper or on electrons?

pax_draconis has said "Truth - and above all, history - should not be a matter of consensus." and to a degree I agree with him. However I also hold the opinion that truth is virtually impossible to pin down, and the more moments elapse between us and the event, the harder it becomes. I think that truth has been a matter of consensus for a very long time, and that Wikipedia is no more nor less to blame for it than the methods of recording and presenting "facts" used by any previous generation, right back to Egyptian pharoahs chiselling their grandparents faces off statues in an effort to change the past.

The "danger" in wikipedia (apart from its lure as a simple go-to source of information) it's in approaching it without an awareness of bias and without accepting that what you are looking at (like the enxylopedia or the school text book before it) is not the whole of the thing. It is part of the elephant but it is not the whole elephant. I was taught that quite efficiently at school, primarily in History and English (and to a lesser degree in Biology of all places). I recall one teacher who helped me understand that the real point of education was not the rote memorization of facts, but to teach the student to think, to be suspicious, to apply their critical faculties to anything presented to them in life, and its something I've believed ever since. Without that foundation, there's no point in worrying about wikipedia becuase we are all doomed anyway.

Wikipedia is a tremendous resource. I for one welcome my new information overlord.