Posted by
Andrews on Friday, July 29, 2011 1:54:27 AM
I was thinking about Wikipedia again today, and it struck me that there was an argument that could be made that Wikipedia, with its endless taxonomies of every subject imaginable, was something of a throwback to the 19th, and even more 18th and 17th century tendency toward scholarly obsession with taxonomy. However, even as I thought of that argument it struck me that there is one significant difference. The obsessive cataloging of the past was conducted largely to support some other scholarly enterprise. Animals were categorized to determine relationships between various species, to identify commonalities and differences. On the other hand, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia only in the sense of covering everything. In the end, rather than creating taxonomies in support of scholarship, it simply creates taxonomies for their own sake. In fact, its opposition to "original research" makes it impossible for Wikipedia to generate any knew knowledge. And so, in the end, it creates not the scholarly taxonomies of the past, but instead lists of trivia, useful for solving bar bets or letting people know where Camden is in relation to Shepherd's Bush, but not anything like a scholarly encyclopedia, and certainly nothing like the general purpose encyclopedia it claims to represent.
I mention this because I have been critical of Wikipedia many times before, and it just struck me today what bothers me the most about it. It is not the philosophy, dangerous as it may be, nor the unreliability of the contents. Both of those are serious problems, and my complaints about them still stand. But there is something else troubling, and that is the perspective and purpose of Wikipedia. Old encyclopedias were not just lists of facts, they were collections of scholarly articles. Even into the era of mass produced encyclopedias, we have articles written by experts, introducing some new insights and providing an understanding of the subject. Wikipedia refuses to follow this pattern, in fact, it forbids it by demanding a neutral viewpoint and insisting any information be cited to an outside source. This means, while Wikipedia may contain the most blatant nonsense so long as it was written elsewhere, it will never generate any new insight, as it is expressly forbidden. And that changes Wikipedia from being anything like the encyclopedias of old into, for lack of a better term, a compendium of trivia. Instead of giving insight into a number of subjects, it simply gathers together whatever can be found related to a given subject and lumps it all together, with no evaluation of relative worth of the various facts, forming nothing more than lists of supposed facts. It is not a source of knowledge, but something akin to the result that would occur if one tried to learn history by reading all the cards in a game of Trivial Pursuit.
Of course, as I said, there are many other reasons to object to Wikipedia, the entire philosophy behind it is flawed in any number of ways, but I think the fact that it refuses to allow anyone to conduct "original research" even such trivial "research" as evaluating the relative merit of sources, that it insists mimeographed conspiracy theories are as valid as scholarly research provided they both can be cited, shows why Wikipedia will never rise above an internet novelty.
POSTSCRIPT
Those interested in my earlier criticisms can find them in the posts "
The Failure of Wikipedia", "
Final Comment on Wikipedia (For Now, Anyway)", "
Wikipedia?", "
Now
I know Why", "
One
More Wikipedia Problem","
Very Short Digression On Wikipedia", "
Wikipedia
Absurdity, Or How To Create Your Own Citation", "
Wikipedia
Syndrome", "
Wikipedia
Absurdities
", "
Stop Confusing Me With The Facts!", "
Mystery Quotes", "
Opinion Masquerading as Fact", "
Funny Numbers", "
Endangered Species", "
Sterility of Formal Economics", "
Wikipedia Absurdity, Or How To Create Your Own Citation", "
Some Libertarian Analogies
", "
Proof Positive", "
Why People Don't Take Academics Seriously", "
Deceiving Themselves?", "
A Question About Language", "
Roman
Legions, Hopscotch, Killer Gays, "Got AIDS Yet", WMDs and a "Damn Piece
of Paper"", "
Very Short Digression On Wikipedia", "
One
More Wikipedia Problem", "
The
Power of Myth on the Internet", "
Vindication", "
Life
is Strange" and "
The Tragedy of the Creative Commons".