Stone age memes: RIP Wikipedia

Not everyone noticed it, but the world ended last week. The Wikipedia model tanked. The New York Times ^[1] reported that the English-language version of the “free ^[2] encyclopedia ^[3] that anyone can edit ^[4]” would will soon institute the editorial review of articles about living people. So there will still be a Wikipedia but the revolutionary encyclopedia we have now will, in effect, cease to exist.

The changes Wikipedia is undergoing are likely to have broad-scale effects on the Internet and on information use throughout cyberspace. They are part of a trend in managing the encyclopedia and have been in place for a year in the German edition. Anonymous users have not been able to create articles for a couple of years now, but according to the Times, “[T]he new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon.” Michael Snow, the chairman of the Wikimedia board, is quoted as saying, “We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks.”

Who can fault the desire for responsible management of a significant information source? Although I am well aware of long-time discussion of problems with the quality of the entries ^[5], I thought the old system worked just fine, and I respected it as a modest start on an annotated catalogue for Borges’ Library of Babel ^[6]. At the same time, the travails of the free encyclopedia highlight the common failure to understand what research is all about, and how to “get the biggest bang out of your research buck.”

Now what I really love about Wikipedia is the “at your fingertips” accounts of popular culture. For example, if you want an extensive, in-depth discussion of the television series The West Wing ^[7], you will find it there. Each episode is summarized, its actors and its inaccuracies listed; the real-world events touched on are chronicled. Harry Potter ^[8] is well described as well: the books, the movies and the difference between them. It makes engrossing reading and it gives good reference.

If you want to know more about a culture, Wikipedia may well give you things to think about. For example, I have been very interested in a kind of fan fiction called slash ^[9], and in yaoi ^[10], Japanese manga about male homosexual relationships, written for women. You may be more interested in Edgar Allan Poe ^[11] or Troll dolls ^[12]. In each case, the online encyclopedia is a great place to start.

Some articles are written at a very high level and well illustrated; the links to related material make Wikipedia an amazing tool for critical thinking. I regularly refer my Classical Civilization students to the entry on the battle of Thermopylae ^[13], which has (today) 146 footnotes, two maps, and an extensive comparison of the descriptions of the battle in Herodotus and in Diodorus Siculus. It is clearly a labor of love, and it has links to treatments of Thermopylae in popular culture ^[14], like the film 300 ^[15], which my students love to read about. We can then discuss Frank Miller’s political views and how they affected his version of the events in the film.

Despite its strengths, Wikipedia has, in a sense, suffered from a kind of Catch-22 ^[16]. Its genius is that it uses the power of the community ^[17] to provide the best version of the information available. The idea is if I start a new entry with a poor explanation of the topic, the next person who can write more clearly, or who has details I left out or misstated, will come along and improve my lame attempt. A formal study ^[18] has borne out that this is exactly the process of article creation. Of the contributors, 70% don’t write their own articles, they improve (or “improve”) the work of others. But this iterative process of composition is just what causes people to distrust what they find. It’s like a version of Groucho Marx’ statement, “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member ^[19].”

In my line of work, Wikipedia is often frowned on, and some of my colleagues will not allow their students to use it as a source in their papers. I find this exasperating, because, as with everything else about research, it’s too easy.

No educated person believes that everything you find in a library, or even a scholarly journal, is true. Why should Wikipedia be any different? You have to read it, you have to notice what evidence it’s based on, you have to think about it, you have to cross-check it. There is no “God said it, I believe it, that settles it ^[20]” when you’re doing research. Period.

Although there are plenty of skeptics, there are increasingly signs that in many cases, Wikipedia is the best basic source on the subject. In 2005, the journal Nature ^[21] conducted a study that found the science entries in Wikipedia are about as accurate as those in other encyclopedias. A year later, Focus, a popular science magazine published by the BBC did a study ^[22] that showed Wikipedia was more timely and more accurate than the leading print encyclopedias. Here is part of what the article said:

Our winner is Wikipedia which had the most detailed articles and was best equipped to deal with the ever-changing news about bird flu. While it was only marginally more accurate, it has close to 10 times more articles than the next biggest, all freely available. That means it’s most likely to have what you need.

Now I have to say there are some situations in which I don’t want Wikipedia in my classes either. I have had lazy students report material from it where they should have been using primary sources, or more nuanced sources from class. But this is the same objection as to any encyclopedia in relation to more technical material.

So really the issue is critical thinking, and the Internet is once again in a good position to make us smarter. It used to be you couldn’t get students to do research, now you can’t stop them from doing it.

The various Wikipedia memes are testimony to the ways people just like to play in the information fields, picking posies as they go. There’s an old one ^[23] which has you pick and post events that happened on your birthday, and a current one ^[24] that calls for creating your own band with a name and album title chosen from Wikipedia, with an album cover randomly chosen from Flickr (Wikipedia is notoriously short of relevant illustrations.) The birthday one allows you some choices, and so in your browsing, you can learn a lot while looking for events that reflect your self image.

The band meme is more constrained, but its results are no less edutaining. I just launched a rock band called Gamma Crucis ^[25], and learned the eponymous giant red star is only visible south of the Tropic of Cancer. That’s why it never received an ancient traditional name, and is named for its place in the constellation Crux. I had never heard of it before. Our first album? Conceal our Whereabouts, from a quote by Saki ^[26], the Burman-born British writer of “witty and sometimes macabre” short stories. I had heard of Saki before, but hadn’t known he was Burmese, or that his stories were macabre. I plan to read one ^[27] soon. Here’s our album cover ^[28], the wonderful work of photographer Danielle Moody:

I especially like the conjunction of a star I’ve never heard of with a sardonic British colonial writer from Burma, and the photograph of a disgruntled but beautiful young woman sitting at the boundary of a beach and a parking lot. It also reminds me, by way of The Glass Palace ^[29] (which is about Burma), of the additions I made recently to the Wikipedia entry for Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome ^[30].

I had just finished the novel and wanted to see what others said about it. The entry I found was by some students who had been required to read the book and were puzzled by it. I was disappointed, but my enthusiasm for the book made me decide to improve the entry. Looking up some scholarly sources, I used them to add points that would have helped the previous contributors understand the way fact and fiction are interwoven in the novel. I see that since I was there, someone has improved my formatting. The entry still needs work by a post-colonialist scholar, but it is much better than before.

There’s all this hand-wringing about the effect of computers on our intelligence, and none of it takes into account the spread of new enthusiasms and new literacies. The emphasis is all on what we have supposedly lost. In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote “Is Google Making Us Stupid ^[31]?” in the Atlantic. He argued that

as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

But you know the old saw: “two men looked out of the prison bars; one saw mud and the other saw a teachable moment.”

One response ^[32] to Nicholas Carr says,

Books built our culture, don’t get me wrong, and have provided wonderful wealth, but ultimately they also undervalued and ignored the natural ways that humans learn: through oral interaction and in a group.

The anthropology of human knowledge indicates the role of the community is not just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. My experiences using Wikipedia suggest it is part of the solution, not the problem. Getting information from the group is much more effective at engendering a fascination for research than is the 19^th century model of the scholar toiling in a solitary bastion of the ivory tower ^[33].