The Perils of Modern Dating . . .

A BIT MORE On WIKIPEDIA

I've already given a few thoughts on Wikipedia (here and here) but Martha Nichols at Athena's Head, has  few worthwhile words on the topic as well. It's worth the read.

The piece begins, "Much as I appreciate Wikipedia’s Book of the World and its many temptations, I’ve come to see it as a geek Satan." [...]

Yes, you know me, too. I hate looking clueless, especially in front of my eight-year-old son. But what I hate more is losing the foundation for all truth in a constantly fracturing informationscape. And now I find that one of Wikipedia’s founders, Larry Sanger, would like to disown his creation.

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However, here’s Problem Number One: Wikipedia entries employ the “objective,” third-person voice of the expert, yet Wikipedians are “largely anonymous” according to the site. So there’s no one to hold accountable for errors. If other writers edit those entries, readers have no way of telling who those anonymous revisers are either.

Standard news writers employ the god-like voice, too, but they have bylines. In journalistic terms, stories develop; the news cycle indicates the way information changes over time.

The crucial point is that writers with bylines remain accountable. The name on the story is responsible for making mistakes, and corrections are noted (at least they’re supposed to be). That’s why I use my name, online and in print, when I’m writing nonfiction. Readers may hate what I have to say, but they know who to point the finger at.

This is the nub of what’s often referred to as the need for “media literacy” in schools: helping students to distinguish between primary and secondary sources—and to sniff out bias and hidden agendas. Yet think about how many school teachers point kids to Wikipedia and nowhere else.

. . . continue reading here.

WIKIPEDIA - FACT or FICTION?

OR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT?

In a practical, immediate way, one sees the limits of the so-called “extended mind” clearly in the mob-made Wikipedia, the perfect product of that new vast, supersized cognition: when there’s easy agreement, it’s fine, and when there’s widespread disagreement on values or facts, as with, say, the origins of capitalism, it’s fine, too; you get both sides. The trouble comes when one side is right and the other side is wrong and doesn’t know it. The Shakespeare authorship page and the Shroud of Turin page are scenes of constant conflict and are packed with unreliable information. Creationists crowd cyberspace every bit as effectively as evolutionists, and extend their minds just as fully. Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity, and no machine, or mind, seems extended enough to cure that.

For the Internet screen has always been like the palantír in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”—the “seeing stone” that lets the wizards see the entire world. Its gift is great; the wizard can see it all. Its risk is real: evil things will register more vividly than the great mass of dull good. The peril isn’t that users lose their knowledge of the world. It’s that they can lose all sense of proportion. You can come to think that the armies of Mordor are not just vast and scary, which they are, but limitless and undefeatable, which they aren’t.

- Adam Gopnik, The Information, The New Yorker.