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Authority of wikipedia

There has been some discussion in response to a newspaper article claiming that Wikipedia is Not Trustworthy because it is not written by Authorities and Anyone Can Change Anything.

The librarian quoted in the article has apparently later said that her words were misconstrued. And so they should be: it's more useful to teach children to read and research critically than to just teach them to find authoritative heavy books.

One of several ironic aspects is that newspapers may be considered more authoritative than wikipedia, but they're not necessarily a more reliable source. Newspapers are never reprinted to correct errors; are largely supported by commercial advertising; publish only a small fraction of letters received; publish opinion pieces on the same page as fact pieces; and are directed by the interests of a high-concentrated circle of owners. (They might print retractions or corrections, but what fraction of people who read a leader will read the retraction on page 5 three days or three weeks later?) None of these mean that you should not read newspapers, but like the Internet they should be read discerningly and critically.

Bertrand Russell got this just about right a good fraction of a century ago:

Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

Douglas Adams (of beloved memory) was even more on the mark:

Because the Internet is so new we still don't really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that's what we're used to. So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can't 'trust' what people tell you on the web anymore than you can 'trust' what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can't easily answer back — like newspapers, television or granite. Hence 'carved in stone.' What should concern us is not that we can't take what we read on the internet on trust — of course you can't, it's just people talking — but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV — a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of 'us'.

posted Thu 9 Sep 2004 in /software/wikipedia | link

Copyright (C) 1999-2007 Martin Pool.