Better Know a Noble

Life After Wikipedia

I can’t remember where I first heard it, but a particular childhood story came to mind when I read Chapters One and Two of Dan Gillmor’s We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People:

Once upon a time, a young king of some distant land desired to master all areas of knowledge. He proceeded to commission a team of learned scholars to prepare for him an authoritative book on every subject. Years past and the scholars weren’t even close to finishing the monumental project. The king then relented, asking for at least a compendium. When that wasn’t enough, the king knocked it down to a digest. Unfortunately, just when the scholars had completed chapter one, the king had past away.

Until recently, creating the penultimate repository for all knowledge was a librarian’s fantasy. No encyclopedia could hire enough experts to submit enough articles to cover all areas. At best, we had to allow the experts an incredible amount of power to triage knowledge for us.

Such undemocratic and ineffective methods of information collecting were symptomatic of the Dark Ages before Internet. Today, however, Wikipedia has revolutionized the way we gather knowledge and even the definition of truth itself. It’s a giant encyclopedia written and edited by thousands of average people. Over the summer, I read an absolutely fascinating article on the history and impact of Wikipedia in The Atlantic Monthly. Marshall Poe, the author, claims that truth has now become what most people, not the experts, say it is:

The power of the community to decide, of course, asks us to reexamine what we mean when we say that something is “true.” We tend to think of truth as something that resides in the world. The fact that two plus two equals four is written in the stars—we merely discovered it. But Wikipedia suggests a different theory of truth. Just think about the way we learn what words mean. Generally speaking, we do so by listening to other people (our parents, first). Since we want to communicate with them (after all, they feed us), we use the words in the same way they do. Wikipedia says judgments of truth and falsehood work the same way. The community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by consensus. Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. The community isn’t likely to do such an absurd or useless thing, but it has the ability.

Wikipedia’s critics warn that the new technology will wrought absolute destruction on authoritative knowledge. Poe, I believe, would counter that Wikipedia has instead entrusted the knowledge of mankind to mankind itself. What belongs to us should be returned to us.