Not long ago, during a discussion about a game, a friend of mine pulled up wikipedia to help resolve a debate. Where I was working from the rules in the box, presumably written by an expert on the game, she invoked the true, unstoppable power of wikipedia with the line, "That was written by one person and this was written by everyone. It must be true."
Of course, she wasn't wholly serious, and wikipedia did have a pretty good perspective to share, but it wasn't the only perspective, it was a neutral perspective and who the heck knows who wrote it. The incident illustrated to me very clearly of a minor footnote shared by Jared Lanier in his book You are Not a Gadget: that in some ways, conceptually, wikipedia and the Bible are not that far from each other.
Bar subject matter, they have more than a little in common:
- Both the Bible and wikipedia are seen as authoritative sources
- They were each written and revised cumulatively over a long period of time
- Authorship of both is shared and largely anonymous
This obscurity of the individual authors of the Bible Lanier explains "served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as 'the literal word of God.'" It is harder to engage in constructive criticism of the content of the Bible versus say, a critique of Gladwell's latest book. To critique Gladwell we can take issue with the person, their background, say it is just his perspective, wonder at his methods, know who influenced him, argue against his idea (because his ideas are just as valid as mine), or just plain not like him. In short, I am arguing against the ideas with recognition that they came from a real person, from a particular time in history, who is human like me. It is more difficult to do this with the Bible. There are no easy authors or faces that we can identify behind the words, and therefore noone to argue or disagree with, or otherwise recognise any of the regular human flaws we might ascribe to anyone else. The trouble is, the same is true of wikipedia.
The longer wikipedia is around the more authoritative and refined we imagine each article becoming. The more distant the individual authors, the less we are able to constructively argue with the content. It becomes less an argument of ideas person to person, and more a question of faith in the collective authorship. Much like the Bible. Lanier also points out that wikis and other web 2.0 type designs also "tend to promote the idea that there is only one universal truth in some arenas where that isn't so."
Beyond simply highlighting this relationship, Lanier also makes the simple recommendation to post as much as possible on the internet as who you really are, not an anonymous pseudonym. This is something that I've started to take to heart. I encourage you to give it a go, and you are welcome to disagree.
Jono Hey, London, March 2011
4 comments:
Nice article Jono. I don't think we have the right amount of distance yet to realize how powerful and ubiquitous Wikipedia might become. However, in two millennia (or probably much faster actually), I can definitely see a day when we refer to Wikipedia as the "great giver of perfect truths".
Given that vision of the 'great giver of perfect truths' I wonder how we would design wikipedia differently, if at all? Maybe we'd design the Internet.
I remember another passage from Lanier's book where he mentions that if, at the dawn of the Internet age, we'd put out our potential great achievement with this wonderful new social technology that we'd eventually be able to recreate a big encyclopedia it would not sound so impressive. But wikipedia is undeniably useful.
I really enjoyed this comparison, mostly because I believe that truth is multiple and culturally situated. One of the interesting things about Wikipedia's evolution is that content change (if not authorship) can be more rigorously documented than that of the Bible. I would love to see an analysis of how histories, written and rewritten over time, emerge through joint edits from an elite community (90% of Wikipedia's content is provided by 10% of the people, mostly men).
Perhaps one possible answer to your design question, Jono, is to make such evolutionary development more visible and accessible to Wikipedia's consumers. This might provide a remedy to the looming "great giver of perfect truths" misconception. When users can see how "facts" and opinions and even relevance of certain types of knowledge change over time, they might be more skeptical of the predominant Wiki-landscape.
Stacy, that's a great idea. I know that there are some visualizations of wikipedia like History Flow, but it's definitely not well built into any individual experience of using the site. There could be a lot more transparency to help people make their judgments of trust and authority.
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