Limits of Internet-based knowledge
Henry at Crooked Timber posted an essay discussing intellectual standards (or lack thereof) on display in analysis of Internet-based knowledge sources vs. traditional sources (e.g. Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica). Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly also followed up.
Henry's essay generated this comment:
.> And I can’t stress how very standard
> Wikipedia is, in terms of the commune/cult
> pattern
which triggered my thoughts below.
Whereas I am always struck by how similar the goings-on at Wikipedia are to what acquaintances who have worked in commercial information publishing tell me happens behind closed doors at those entities. Very few encyclopedia insiders have ever broken the veil, but the essays by Asimov and Feynman tend to confirm what I have heard from much smaller players.
Does Britannica have access to substantial experts who can make definitive statements on certain topics? Yes. At the same time, topics where definitive statements can be made usually have pretty good entries in Wikipedia too. I have looked up Wikipedia articles on certain lesser-known electric power generation technology and found them more thorough and better written than Britannica's.
When you get to controversial historical and political topics, of course, Wikipedia's entries go crazy. But is that different from Britannica? Or just carried out in the open? What would a Britannica article on the Tuskegee Experiments written for the 1970 edition had said? Nothing. Yet some of Britannica's medical contributors _had_ to have known those experiments were going on. How would that compare to a crazy, "conspiracy theory" (parallel universe) Wikipedia entry on the same subject in 1970? Would the answer be different in 1974?
Perhaps this could be addressed by entities such as Britannica providing more of their reference and source information, and the identities of the authors of their entries. That would allow the concerned reader to dig deeper and judge the trustworthiness of the material (and the "experts") for themselves. Then again, wouldn't that make them more like Wikipedia?
sPh
I would agree, if what goes on inside Wikipedia is a "cult," then it seems the same label could be applied to Britannica.
But I actually disagree with the broader statement, that Wikipedia is cult-like. While it's true that there are far fewer editors/writers than readers, isn't there still a decent number of them?
What's more, there isn't only one wiki out there. True, Wikipedia is the biggest, but wikis are more of a technology, or application, than anything else. And that's where the "wisdoms of the crowds" angle comes from...not Wikipedia, but "wikipedia."
While admittedly a much less ambitious project than an Encyclopedia Of Everything, as a fan of LOST, I really enjoy Lostpedia. Fans there do a great job of posted show details and theories (much more than I could ever come up with alone...), truly demonstrating the "wisdom of crowds" idea.
And, of course, there's dkospedia...
"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani
June 22, 2007 1:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think that commune/cult-like is absolutely the wrong description; I think that that commenter must have a very warped "standard" on that. You DO see cult-like behavior on political web sites, but wikipedia is much more involved with individual egos contributing and fighting, and having all kinds of personal vested interests in spin one way or another, nearly an opposing thing to "cult-like." And you also see this ego thing in academia, so that is probably in sync with your statement that the similar happens behind closed doors in traditional publication.
I think the problems of wikipedia are much more complex because they are always in process of refining their system and long ago left a lot of the "one man, one vote democracy" behind. There's an editing hierarchy, and it's not communistic. I myself find a lot of entries much improve the last year or so. This article really got into that in detail; I highly recommend it:
I don't like the approach to the problem in the essays in your links. I think it's better to look at the whole problem like this: "internet-based knowledge" is in its infancy. We've got a long way to go. It's improving all the time, but a long, long way to go, decades at minimum. (Google, for example, is still suprisingly limited in what it covers from the internet alone, that's not even addressing everything ever published, much less all of human knowledge.)
I think the ego problem is unavoidable. You can't get better than human expertise and wisdom from long experience in an area, it's very faulty but you still can't get the best knowledge in most areas without it. That goes for a car mechanic or a historian. What humans have found most successful in the past is compare/contrast/debate between those with the most expertise, a panel of those with expertise including some of those not dismissive of "common sense" as well. The latter is an important factor, but balancing of that, that's very necessary. Letting the commons rule is not going to get you anything but lowest common denominator and status quo, no genius, no Galileo's vs. the Catholic church.
I might add that the compare/contrast is why scholarship includes footnotes. Increasingly, wikipedia demands them: they are growing up. Unfortunately, they are often links to things already on the internet rather than the much vaster published knowledge in the heads of experts that have read in any area. I think that's where you are still not seeing breaking out of lowest common denominator.
June 22, 2007 2:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Letting the commons rule is not going to get you anything but lowest common denominator and status quo, no genius, no Galileo's vs. the Catholic church.
I think it depends on the kinds of problems you're trying to solve.
Again, one may think this example is trivial or trite, but if you look at the Lostpedia site, it's clearly an approach that is enhanced by the commons, the collective intelligence of the crowd. No one person could ever "tackle" the kind of problem-solving that goes on around LOST. It's too much information to process -- you may not remember what happened in Season One, Episode Three, but I just watched it, and I figured out the connection to this week's show.
I think that's a model that can be emulated elsewhere, with other more "important" problems, and doesn't at all lead us down a least common denominator path.
"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani
June 22, 2007 2:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
"You can't get better than human expertise ...."
Excellent comment / analysis
June 23, 2007 10:41 PM | Reply | Permalink