Posted by
Andrews on Saturday, January 31, 2009 10:04:30 PM
Warning: The article about which I am writing is rather off color. I'll try to keep it as clean as possible, but for the very squeamish, I offer a warning. And please, if you are easily offended, DO NOT follow the links to Wikipedia or "Savage Love"! (Links to my complaints about Wikipedia are all family friendly, well written, lucid, erudite and heartily endorsed by the author, a man known for a humility second only to his skills in shameless self-promotion.)
As my regular readers know, I have
any number of objections to Wikipedia, to its
philosophy, its
practice, even to the
hypocritical acts of its founder. However, I have found what has to be the most absurdly hypocritical of all Wikipedia acts ever.
As I wrote before, Wikipedia has this
bizarre philosophy where common sense is
rejected as "Original Research", while even
blatantly nonsensical statements or outright contradictions can stand so long as there is a citation. Citations are so potent that even
outright slander is allowed to stand, despite common sense arguments against it, because it can be cited to a source, no matter how dubious.
So, what to do if you know Wikipedia is wrong, yet you can't find someone who wrote about something obvious? For example, suppose you need to prove 2+3=5, but you can't find a source who writes on blatantly obvious facts? Some other gent found a citation proving 2+3=6.75 and is touting it as definitive, so how to you refute him?
Simple, write to an online columnist and have him confirm your suspicions. Voila! Instant citation! Yes, that's right, you send your comments, get the source to reply, and you have an instant citation.
And this is what happened in the
Wikipedia article on the rather grotesque, and patently false, sexual act called a "Donkey Punch". Apparently the editors, not being teenaged boys, were aware the act was apocryphal, but unfortunately the internet, being ruled by teenaged boys, and adults whose maturation stopped in their early teens, has only articles which believe in the reality of the donkey punch. As a result the editors could not simply write "this is a lie, it won't work". After all, to state an obvious truth is "original research". So, rather than be forced to hold their tongues, one of the editors wrote to the
"Savage Love" column, asking the columnist to confirm the falsehood of the act.
And thus did the editors brew up their own citation to confirm what they already knew, and so they avoided the horror of "original research".
The problems with this should be obvious. I have written before of the problems with rejecting common sense unless one can provide a citation, and also about the problems with accepting all and sundry citations without weighing the source, but this is a somewhat novel problem. Now, thanks to this precedent, editors can present whatever bias they want. No longer do they have to look for a biased source pleasing to their orthodoxy, they can simply write a request to their favorite fellow traveler columnist. And if they can't find one? Why, they could post their own article on a blog or other website, and just cite themselves!
Then again, I suppose this all is just another manifestation of Wikipedia's main problem, the inability to weigh sources. Thanks to their NPOV doctrine, and their insanely egalitarian approach, it is impossible to place relative weights on differing sources, and so absolute drivel stands beside the testimony of experts and carries equal weight.
Which is the reason I will continue using encyclopedias with professional editors and some policy of editorial evaluation of sources. Wikipedia is fine if you want to know who played Ginger or what the score of game 3 was in the 1972 World Series, but beyond that, I would not trust it.
Of course, my professionally compiled encyclopedia does not have articles on donkey punches, but I think I can live with that omission.