One of my fellow Bibliobloggers, Rick at This Lamp has been extolling the virtues of the Encyclopedia Britannica again. Rick is concerned about the accuracy of Wikipedia. I can understand his concern about truth being compromised when anyone can edit an entry, but Rick is missing the point. I challenged Rick’s premise on this before back in May in another post.
The bigger picture here is globalization and democratization of knowledge. Wiki knowledge fits within the framework of a new way of organizing knowledge in the modern world. The era of printed collections of information gathered by an elite group of experts is slowly coming to an end.
There is an analagous example in the realm of blogging. Rick and I are just two of 50 million bloggers yet the system is self-organizing and self-validating. In other words, there are ways for information consumers to understand who is respected (links, popularity, etc) and who is telling the truth. In the good old days if we wanted to publish our thoughts we would have had to pass through a gate-keeper (publisher, magazine editor, etc.). Now you are your own gate-keeper.
I see googlization as a positive trend but it brings with it a big change in how we access information. I remember writing a paper on the subject of royalty in the history plays of Shakespeare. In order to find the quotes I needed I had to actually… gasp… read the plays! Over and over again. Can you imagine! What would you do today if you were writing such a paper? You’d google the topic of course! You’d start googling combinations of keywords until you were pointed to an online information source that perhaps allowed you to search Shakespeare’s plays. In the process you’d probably come across other writers who had tackled the subject and use them in your bibliography.
This has happened with Bible knowledge as well. There are some of us out there who grew up memorizing scripture in a particular version and to this day can still remember certain verses only in that version. But in the modern era with the growth of Bible translation it is becoming harder to “peg” Bible knowledge to a particular translation and so a lot of us are increasingly turning to Bible software and online searches to find verses using keywords. I can remember a time when I couldn’t remember exactly where a verse was found but I knew that it was at the top of the left page! Do you think our children will organize knowledge that way?
So, Rick, I respect your concerns. We’re all concerned about Wikipedia being abused for political and ideological reasons. But frankly, Encyclopedia Britannica has its own political and ideological aims as well. The difference is that with Wikipedia you have a collective mind composed of hundreds of editors “mediating truth” rather than some ivory tower cabal working at EB. Rather than shooting down Wikipedia, I think the real discussion we need to have is how can trusted sources of information like Encyclopedia Britannica embrace Wiki forms of information gathering and disseminating in order to stay dynamic.
Wikipedia is a new kind of encyclopedia for a new kind of mind. The global citizen is going to need global information and it is unlikely that this knowledge is going to carry the name of an 18th century colonializer.
Follow-up posts:
The Flattening of Knowledge
The Sum Of Human Knowledge
Lingamish,
Wikipedia is a pet peeve of mine. I have always assumed that it is updated between major sports events, a slow night on sportsnet! Actually, however, at an 8:1 ratio for men to women, maybe wikipedia is pretty accessible to women, compared to some other environments.
No, I don’t want Britannica updated by Wikipedia’s methods.
Here’s the deal…I’m not completely against the Wikipedia. I use it regularly and have quite a few links to it on my blog. I created a link to it in the blog I wrote today.
But I have trouble being confident in the Wikipedia for any kind of serious investigation of a subject. I might go there, but I don’t know who wrote the information and I don’t know how accurate the information is. At least with Britannica, I can at least know it was written by an expert in the area. Granted, “experts” can have bias, too, but at least the information in Britannica is not a moving target.
As for research as in regard to my students, the real problem is that the average student–high school, college, and even higher–does not adequately know how to discern good sources from bad sources.
I’ve watched as students run searches in Google and immediately run to the top selections regardless of whether they are actual good sources or not.
Yes, David, you and I are two of 50 million voices in the blogospheres, but even with that ratio, we have a greater voice that the average person did a mere ten years ago. That’s great, but words have to be weighed carefully.
I’m not afraid of the democritization of knowledge, but more of the democritization of truth. That’s what Colbert was driving at. If enough people think it’s true, it becomes fact. And unfortunately, too many people don’t know the difference.
I’ll hold on to my Britannica as long as they are willing to print it. Currently, I’m saving my pocket change at the end of the day and dropping it into my “Britannica Fund.” I estimate that it will take me a decade to save enough for a new set, but by that time my set will be 20 years old and time for a new edition. Hopefully, they’ll still be around.
Thanks, Rick, for a fair response. We’ve got some differences of opinion here but nothing that fundamentally can’t be overcome by dialogue.
Two issues here that seem paramount are:
1. Determining truth. You see the concept of an “expert” being a safe-guard against falsehood, while I see the concept of “democratic editing” being that safe-guard. Maybe another way of looking at this is that it is an authority question.
2. Old vs. new media. Wikipedia and EB represent two very different forms of publishing. It seems to me that the rate of information growth and change in this century makes the thought of waiting 20 years to get an update unthinkable. At the same time, hyper-editing at Wikipedia seems fraught with danger.
The implications of this subject for determining biblical truth are I think even more crucial.
David, I decided to respond to your anti-Britannica rhetoric on my own blog. See The Sum of Human Knowledge at This Lamp.
Thanks for that, Rick. I had actually thought about formally approaching you and suggesting an exchange of posts on this subject but if it is happening spontaneously then all the better. And yes “rhetoric” is probably a good description of some of my comments. “ivory tower cabal!” “18th century colonializer!” Oh my! But it gets so dull being calm and rational in expression all the time.
I look forward to reading your post.
Oh here’s a very astute article written last week about the value of the Wikipedia: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50902
Warning, some of it may be a bit off-color, but hey…it’s the WIKIPEDIA.
I happened to receive (off topic on a biblical Hebrew mailing list!) some interesting comments on how Wikipedia works. Wikipedia was probably right to reject Karl’s often very odd ideas, but it is worrying that they reject refutations of factual errors.