It is not often that something makes me laugh so hard I cannot breathe, but a recent piece on “wikigroaning” did. It consists simply of a list of paired topics on Wikipedia: the game is just to guess which has the longer and more detailed entry and thus is more important to the nerds who write Wikipedia.
In this way we learn that the entire universe can be described in 6 623 words, which makes it smaller, or at least less interesting, than Transformers: Universe — “a line of toys consisting of repainted re-releases from various Transformers toy lines”, which gets an entry 8 752 words long.
Some of these subject pairs are more obvious: the game Second Life gets 8 743 words, while “real life” gets 1 502. “Love” is worth 6 486 words in Wikipedia; “masturbation”, 10 487.
The coupling that brought me to a complete wheezing collapse was more subtle. Wikipedia has a list of conflicts in the Middle East — a subject of some considerable importance, which it ought to cover, and does, in 1 043 words. The list of furry role-playing games, however, runs to 2 745 words. Furries are people who pretend to be animals for sexual gratification. No wonder Wikipedia’s masturbation entry is so comprehensive.
In some ways, these Wikipedia statistics are even more depressing than the General Social Survey poll data last week that revealed that 28% of American adults believe it is “definitely false” that humans evolved from other animals — and only 18% think it is “definitely true”. The latter is also the proportion of Americans who believe that the sun goes around the Earth.
Before we get too smug as Europeans, the figures for the European Union as a whole are even worse. So here we have a society in which adults are just as likely to believe that the sun goes around the Earth as that evolution is true, which has also built an encyclopedia based on the idea that the truth will emerge from cooperative debate. The problem is obvious. Is there a solution?
Some optimists suppose that the answer will come with an older generation. Where are all those well-informed retired people who have nothing better to do with their lives than to correct the mistakes of Wikipedia? I’m not sure, but I suspect that anyone who has the knowledge needed for the task has, almost by definition, better things to do with their lives.
The problem is not, perhaps, writing a better article on an important subject than what is already there. It is writing it over and over again in the face of ignorant and destructive edits. No one can teach without authority. You can get people to pretend to do so, by paying them, but Wikipedia is a volunteer effort.
Perhaps the answer is the Citizendium, the version of Wikipedia where the answers will be approved by experts that has been launched by one of the founders of the original project. But I don’t think that will work very well either. Their discussion on truth and bias is extraordinarily simpleminded.
“We could,” they say, “state a series of theories about topic T, and then claim that the truth about T is such-and-such. But again, consider that the Citizendium is an international, collaborative project. Probably, as we grow, nearly every view on every subject will be found among our authors and readership.
“To avoid edit wars, we should agree to present each of these views fairly, and not assert any one of them as correct. And that is what makes an article ‘unbiased’ or ‘neutral’.”
But the choice in such matters is not between treating only one view as true and treating all views as potentially true. No one in real life does so about any subject that they understand. There are a very large number of theories or fact claims that are simply false; two or three that may reasonably be held by a well-informed student in good faith. It is the job of an encyclopedia to direct us to the very few stories that might be true, whatever the opinions of the mass of readers.
In the end, if we are going to act on information, we have to make judgements about truth, and an encyclopedia that refuses to take that risk is lying to us. If that is all that anyone is prepared to pay for in future, that is all we will get. On the other hand, we will know a great deal about masturbation. — Guardian Unlimited Â