There is something truly refreshing about an honest, over the top rant, and Nick Carr delivers such a beauty in spades in his most recent post about Wikipedia and its offspring. It it truly a thing to behold, and has the added benefit of making some good points. For example:
Whatever happens between Wikipedia and Citizendium, here's what Wales and Sanger cannot be forgiven for: They have taken the encyclopedia out of the high school library, where it belongs, and turned it into some kind of totem of "human knowledge." Who the hell goes to an encyclopedia looking for "truth," anyway? You go to an encyclopedia when you can't remember whether it was Cortez or Balboa who killed Montezuma or when you want to find out which countries border Turkey. What normal people want from an encyclopedia is not truth but accuracy. And figuring out whether something is accurate or not does not require thousands of words of epistemological hand-wringing. If it jibes with the facts, it's accurate. If it doesn't, it ain't. One of the reasons Wikipedia so often gets a free pass is that it pretends it's in the truth business rather than the accuracy business. That's bullshit, but people seem to buy it.
Ah, great point. There is a huge difference between truth and accuracy, a point that journalists wrestle with every day. And then, the meat of the rant, copied here for your total enjoyment:
Enlightenment, of course, presupposes darkness: If we're to be delivered into the light, then we must be mired in the murk of ignorance. So Sanger has to paint a fantastical picture of the past for his observations about the present and future to carry any weight. In his fantasy, "what we know" has through the ages been tightly controlled by all-powerful elites and doled out to us like so many spoonfuls of baby food:
"In the Middle Ages, we were told what we knew by the Church; after the printing press and the Reformation, by state censors and the licensers of publishers; with the rise of liberalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, by publishers themselves, and later by broadcast media - in any case, by a small, elite group of professionals."
If this isn't complete nonsense, it is such a ridiculous exaggeration that, for all practical purposes, it's indistinguishable from complete nonsense. What's most appalling is the way it presents "we" - by which I assume Sanger means the entirely imaginary claylike mass of undifferentiated beings that to him and others of his ilk represents mankind - as being dumb receptor valves entirely without imagination or a capacity for free thought. If from the Enlightenment to the present, "we" were spoonfed "what we know" by some central cabal of elitist gatekeepers bent on thought control, then why are we - or, more precisely, were we - so smart?
Take a look at your average educated citizen of, say, 1850 and compare the breadth of his knowledge with that of the average educated citizen of today (17 years after the invention of the glorious World Wide Web and six years after the blessed arrival of Wikipedia). I mean, really: there's no comparison. If elites were tightly controlling "what we know" for the past few centuries, they were certainly doing a clumsy job of it. Are we to suppose that all the great thinkers of the past would have been really smart if only they could have surfed the web?
Other good rantlings:
In fact, by presenting knowledge as a readymade commodity, a Happy Meal for Thinkers in a Hurry, it may well be doing more to retard creative thought than to spur it....
The quality of an encyclopedia is not determined by the number of experts who sign up to contribute but by the skill of the writers and editors who translate what the experts know into the language of the lay reader. That's a job that experts and crowds are both profoundly ill-suited for.
I hope Carr had as much fun writing his essay as I did reading it. And, amongst the classical references and clever jabs, he makes some cogent points about both the upside and downside to the wisdom of the crowds, the relationship between truth and balance and what knowledge really means.