Wikipedia has been the talk of a lot of intellectual media lately. After all, wikis are pretty unique projects with a unique approach to creation–and Wikipedia as an elaborate source of common knowledge, a collective cultural written consciousness: That deserves some serious attention.
But let us not forget, however impressively massive Wikipedia may become, there’s always a wiki still bigger: the internet itself. It’s an elaborate, open-source pool of information that we all can (and do) add to.
We turn to the internet with a huge range of everyday questions, even though we accept on a basic level that we can’t always trust the answers it provides. Remember, before Wikipedia, how did we learn about things? We googled them. And like Wikipedia, the internet knows what we know–at least what we think we know.
Bonnie Ruberg is a sex, technology, and video games journalist who contributes regularly to publications like The Economist, Forbes, and The Village Voice. By day she's also a comparative literature PhD student at UC Berkeley, where she studies French, English, gender, sexuality, surrealism and perversion. You can reach her at [her first name and last name, all one big word] AT gmail DOT com.
August 14th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Yes! I wanted to say that the Colbert link was quite hilarious.
However, I gotta bone to pick with you here Bonnie. I think the wikipedia is the antithesis of the Internet (notice the nifty caps on Internet, ugh, I disgust myself).
The internet is organized while the wikipedia is freeform anarchy. The internet works with toplevel domain severs being trusted and treated as an ‘authority’ on which an ip address is the actual location of a domain name.
The wikipedia is a last-word compromise of the truth, giving into not just one bias but every single bias. Even if Colberts piece is humorous, I think it hits every nail on the head.
Imagine (if you will and while I ramble) an Internet run by a wikipedia like framework. I say heroine-sheik.com is at 10.0.0.1 but someone else says “no” its actually at 10.10.10.10 because it looks nicer. While you, the authority of that domain name, must incorperate our ideas.
With no trusted authority, truth is defined by the masses, and the masses are made up of people, who each interpret reality uniquely.
Lastly, on the internet, each page is relatively secure. Sure I might be able to hack your server and change your pages so that it looks like you support the KKK, but I am breaking laws to do it, there is some technical issues to surmount, etc. But on the wikipedia, doing that is not only possible, its the point of the system. Add to that a hidden system of super-users (editors), the whole peer idealogy becomes a lie.
My apologies for ranting. I so freaking hate the wikipedia and how its treated like the second coming.
August 14th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
Coldstone: one shouldn’t confuse an imposed organizational hierarchy with editorial control over content. Both the Internet and Wikipedia have the former. However, wikis do have moderators who oversee the content of their sites, even though some are quite lax about enforcing them; still, I’ve seen plenty of “controversial” topics with locked entries on Wikipedia, to prevent net.vandalism, essentially. By and large, those who “run” the infrastructure of the Internet (i.e., the ISPs) do not – and should not! – have any control over the information being passed through it.
On wikis, the moderators still have final say – for good and ill. Frankly, forums and Usenet are far more anarchic than wikis are. :-) And as always, PA puts it best.
Oh, and grammatically speaking, I believe “internet” (lowercase “i”) is the appropriate spelling for any internetwork (i.e., network of multiple computer networks); whereas “Internet” (capital “I”) is the accepted spelling when speaking of the global information bypass we know and love. :-)
In any case, I see wikis as a variant life form evolving in the tidal pool of digital information: a virtual offshoot of our continual experiments in how to collate and organize data.
August 14th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
P.S. God help you kids who grew up in the Internet Age if you ever have to find information which isn’t in Google… :-)
August 14th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Information that isn’t in Google? That’s just blasphemous. Google knows all. Google is all.
Anyways, I’m sick of people who claim that Wikipedia is terribly flawed because of its open editing. Sure, it allows bias to creep in, but there’s almost always some form of bias in any resource. If I ask a random group of people about the Iraq war, there’s a bias. If I ask an expert, there’s a bias. In general, Wikipedia isn’t really any better or worse. It’s just really convenient.
August 14th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
I think the wikipedia is the antithesis of the Internet.
Of course, the comparison isn’t perfect–but it is pretty similar.
The internet is organized while the wikipedia is freeform anarchy.
Really? That’s how I feel about the internet ;).
grammatically speaking, I believe "internet" (lowercase "i") is the appropriate spelling for any internetwork (i.e., network of multiple computer networks); whereas "Internet" (capital "I") is the accepted spelling when speaking of the global information bypass we know and love.
Bahumbug, I’d feel like my mother if I capitalized “internet”.
Anyways, I'm sick of people who claim that Wikipedia is terribly flawed because of its open editing.
Oh, I’m not saying it’s better, worse, whatever–it’s just a crazy cultural analysis playground.
August 14th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
I wasn’t referring to anyone in particular, especially not you, but whenever people talk about Wikipedia there’s always an implied connection between “open to editing” and “wildly inaccurate” that gets on my nerves.
August 15th, 2006 at 5:57 am
Whatever flaws it may have (and the potential for serious flaws is certainly there), it is at least a good first-step in seeing if you want to research something further (if you don’t start with google of course…). The mistake would be to rely on net sources exclusively with something you have interest in, when other sources are available, I suppose.
August 15th, 2006 at 8:00 am
Sure, it allows bias to creep in, but there's almost always some form of bias in any resource.
That was kinda my point, though I do ramble, so it probably wasn’t very clear :) I personally would want just one bias to deal with, rather than a thousand unknown biases.
whenever people talk about Wikipedia there's always an implied connection between "open to editing" and "wildly inaccurate" that gets on my nerves.
It isn’t just implied, there have been studies that have shown there exists wildy inaccurate information on Wikipedia.
I certainly don’t mean to start a flame war over Wikipedia, but like I said, 98% of the time, I hear how freaking great the Wikipedia. Its not just the Wikipedia, its the blind reliance on anything with no accountability, open to anything.
Regardless of how well moderated the wikipedia is (which if its too well moderated, its the same as a real Encyclopedia, with books and everything), truth is not defined by the masses.
‘1500 years ago, everybody “knew” that the earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody “knew” that the earth was flat.’
August 15th, 2006 at 8:48 am
Yes, but the same problem of “blind reliance” applies to anything. There’s bad information in most sources, so the problem isn’t Wikipedia, it’s people who look at only one source and automatically trust it.
Hell, Wikipedia even has an advantage over many sources because of the citations at the bottom of the page. If you don’t trust what’s written there, you can look at where it (supposedly) came from
August 16th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
Quick interestingness – I suspect that some people (not the sharpest tools in the shed, perhaps) have started to use the internet as a kind of “Oracle” for their everyday questions and concerns.
I was led to this realization by a recent fark.com discovery where apparently a woman’s affair could be discerned by her searches on AOL, which were public access, although her identity was not. The interesting aspect was that she typed in full-text questions, as if querying some kind of all-knowing-all-seeing goddess of knowledge. The oracle angle raises some interesting implications.
Anyway, love to discuss this further – if you’re interested, drop me a note at coherent@fumetsu.org or visit my blog as above.
August 17th, 2006 at 9:42 am
I wasn't referring to anyone in particular, especially not you.
Sorry, I wasn’t referring back to anyone in particular, especially not you ;-). I just meant it as a general response to the issue of “good/bad”.
The interesting aspect was that she typed in full-text questions.
Hmm, I definitely know people who do that. In my experience, it’s mostly just people who don’t know how to properly use search engines. Though you wonder, is that really any more out there using Google for answers in general?
August 18th, 2006 at 4:28 pm
Isn’t that “question asking” thing how they show people using AskJeeves on the commercials?
Then again, I might just be imagining that.
August 20th, 2006 at 6:50 am
Isn't that "question asking" thing how they show people using AskJeeves on the commercials?
I’m pretty sure that was the idea, but in my experience it never really worked. Plus, I’m pretty sure AskJeeves itself is dead. It’s so hard to get good help these days.
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