Wikipedia...

As discussed in our first “Technology and Culture” class, the internet is sometimes similar to the “wild west.“ A Harvard professor who included nine Wikipedia articles for his Jewish history class stated it best by saying, “Wikipedia represents all that is great and all that is dangerous about the Internet. It is incredibly powerful and readily available, and yet can mislead the unwary and spread disinformation.”(Dalby 104) In Technopoly, Neil Postman proclaims, “Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems.” (Postman 69) I don’t know this for a fact- maybe I’ll start a Wikipedia page about it- but I get the notion that Professor Postman probably does not have “warm and fuzzy” thoughts and feelings for Wikipedia. A journalist from the venerable New York Times referred to Wikipedia as an “intellectual lunatic asylum.” (Dalby 62) Personally, I like a little insanity.

For the same reasons that many intellectuals would not embrace Wikipedia, including Middlebury College in Vermont which outlawed references to Wikipedia in student papers, (Dalby 105) are the same reasons Wikipedia is so appealing to me. Wikipedians, especially people who contribute to the online encyclopedia regularly, seem like such a fun bunch of folks. How can you not like someone who calls themselves “Cereales Killer” and the community in which such creative pen names are the norm?


I find disorganized, self policing groups like the “people who wiki” extremely fascinating. They understand that their survival and that of Wikipedia is based on their abiding by a set of rules and traditions. In a mass collaboration such as this, one would think that volatile topics like political allegiances would produce tense exchanges, but as Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Whales explained, “It turns out it’s actually the party of the thoughtful and reasonable people and the party of the jerks. And those aren’t left or right, they can come from all sides.” (Dalby 111) Historian Roy Rosenzweig said that “Wikipedians say they want to describe disputes rather than to take sides in them, to characterize differing positions fairly.” (Dalby 78) And this is because the common welfare of the group comes first in this community. They know that close-minded folks like those at Middlebury College will have evidence to fuel their ignorance if Wiki entries are inaccurate and the only way to continue to grow is to put the good of Wikipedia first and ego second. Dalby details a couple of misinformation mishaps in the first half of the book, but in comparison to number of articles on Wikipedia, they are minimal.


As my favorite French admin Cereales Killer concluded, “… and that’s why Wikipedia corresponds to my vision of the sharing of knowledge, the common ownership of gray matter, with no partisanship, for the good of all… I see Wikipedia as a great way to share knowledge in a completely disinterested way. (Dalby 79) I think Thomas Jefferson would agree with Cereales Killer!!


"Information is the currency of democracy."

Thomas Jefferson
American 3rd US President (1801-09). Author of the Declaration of Independence. 1762-1826