Wikipedia again

Taking a moment away from my massive addiction to Facebook, I found a few interesting articles about Wikipedia featuring an interview with the "liberal" creator of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and "conservative" Mr. Robert Cox. Here are a further posts about Wikipedia, from various points of view.

Warning: It's a very long read, you could just read the interview (first post), and then scroll to the "Cult of the Amateur" section in the last article. For those with some guts to get into great detail, the second article is amazing, and pedantically outlines everything that needs to be said about Wikipedia's poor quality in some pretty exacting detail.

It certainly won't change the opinions of my fellow free-information software engineers, but it certainly does illustrate that my opinion is not the ramblings of a lone lunatic.

While I was reading the first article, I found three things stuck with me:

1. Why are Americans so obsessed with labeling this or that person "liberal" or "conservative"? It seems to be a label that seeks to divide people into two groups, an never acknowledging that there is a middle ground, or even that the true situation is very much a spectrum - a whole, massive range of middle is possible. Such a black-and-white mentality clouds the discussion and draws battle lines for lots of people to knock heads, but will foster very little compromise.
   
2. There seems to be a kind of xenophobic fear that these "conservatives" have (and Jimmy Wales loves to exploit, pointing it out repeatedly) that the rest of the world is not as conservative as the U.S., and in fact far more liberal. Jimbo seems to want to paint Robert Cox, in that article at least, to be a rest-of-the-world fearing anti-liberal campaigner. But it really does get you thinking. What is "neutrality"? What is liberal/conservative, as a label, really?
   
3. Jimmy Wales is not very good at defending Wikipedia - he's okay at re-explaining things that his detractors get wrong (either accidentally or deliberately), but he's not very good at giving an impartial point of view or backing up his own side with anything that is not anecdotal or personally opinionated.
   

Let me know what you think!

The last article goes onto a tangential point, and says:

And so, having gone on for so long, I at long last come to my point. The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. The layoffs we've recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.

What do my fellow free-information software engineers think? Are we really so idealistic to believe that all the open-source, free-software anti-corporation software we are creating isn't going to affect the software economy and ultimately make us poorer? It's kind of a loaded question, I know, but I feel just a little bit queasy every time I hear open-source software described in semi-rapturous tones, as if being open-source is an inherent good.

I'm far from a free-market loving uber-capitalist, but I am very wary of points of view that seem more like dogma than cogent arguments.

The Manifesto

I promised myself and the world that I would never write a blog. I thought I believed it, but now my convictions and the overwhelming, insatiable urge to write gives me no other alternative. Of course, dear readers, I need to provide some justification for my hypocrisy that extends beyond the words of my hero, Walt Whitman:

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am deep, I contain many contradictions."

But first, my qualms: there has been a backlash recently against the horrors of web 2.0, and blogs, youTube, MySpace and Facebook exemplify this. The internet has rapidly morphed into a shrine to the cult of the amateur. Half-baked attempts at humour and endless, pointless clips litter youTube, with mirror gazing teenagers eager to post 10 minute clips of themselves talking much about nothing. Over singing in front of your computer wins you accolades and possibly even a recording contract.

Myspace and Facebook are another horror apart from the tween dominated clip site; seething domains of copious amounts of time wasting procrastination. Connecting to friends and people you know is one thing, but is "connecting" to your fellows via the three sentence message "Omfg, I found you on facebook. How's it going, bro?" really some kind of intimate connection with those you know and love? Or is it in fact a far more lonely, "look at me" cry for attention that the digital doppleganger that is "online networking" makes us believe is meaningful?

Blogs, despite their journalistic power and potential, are the pinnacle of the narcissistic, amateurish broadcasting of brainwaves that best represents web 2.0. Just how many people read blogs, and how many people post blogs? How many blogs really have something to say that is worth hearing? A lot of content is being generated, but I wonder if it encourages amateurs to polish their grammar, written skills and critical thinking, or does it just allow people the cover of anonymity to criticise and mudsling, and the tools from which to broadcast low quality material of the world?

I think it was Plato who said:

"No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education."

An education composed of videos on youtube and a life in front of games without the knowledge and ability to process these things in context is no education at all. The worst possible kind of education is half an education. I would add to those words of sagacity with an annex - the worst kind of production is a half-good one, the worst kind of opinion is an half-informed one, the worst kind of idea is a half-baked one.

Democratic internet movements such as wikipedia are another facet of the half-baked education. It aims to be an encyclopaedia of the people, by the people. That's damn democratic, and beautiful to boot. Recent research by Nature magazine even shows that wikipedia compares well with Brittanica. Most of the students I teach and my own fellows use wikipedia on a regular basis, justifying their laziness in searching for a more credible site with "Well, I just wanted a quick review."

However, using the best discussion of the reliability of wikipedia I could find (ironially, this was on wikipedia itself) says:

Viewing Wikipedia as fitting the economists' definition of a perfectly competitive marketplace of ideas, George Bragues (University of Guelph-Humber), examined Wikipedia's articles on seven top Western philosophers: Aristotle, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, Georg W.F. Hegel, Thomas Aquinas, and John Locke. Wikipedia's articles were compared to a consensus list of themes culled from 4 reference works in philosophy. Bragues found that, on average, Wikipedia's articles only covered 52% of consensus themes. No errors were found, though there were significant omissions.

Significant omissions are even more significant for "quick overviews" than for in depth research. I find it both sad and intensely demoralising that university students would resort to wikipedia as a source of information - the trust that is placed in this website is just amazing.

It is us, the youth of our world who are driving these developments, and it is ultimately us that decides what we are to do with them.

That said, Wikipedia itself is a highly democratic, and is passable at being a place to find summaries of non-contentious issues; further, many pages provide links and references to more reputable sources. There is even a somewhat haphazard project to place the entire contents of Encyclopaedia Brittanica that have passed into public domain. Use it, by all means, for it really is the largest reference of human knowledge in history, but understand the limits of such a democratic information source, where content is "dirty" and in fact could be plain false.

In the defense of the other aspects of web 2.0, it's not really all that bad. youTube has some fantastic content, such as the posting of Japanese content with copyright that does not apply outside of Japan, and many parodies, clip shows and amateur short films are very good examples of what people can do without the professional veneer of Hollywood and television networks.

As a portal for creative pursuits and distribution of our modern television-based culture, youTube is unmatched in brining material by the masses, for the masses, to the masses. Esmee Denters is actually pretty good, its her lucklustre imitators and clingers-on who clutter our mindspace. In some rather old news, youTube is proving so popular that even politicians are getting in on the act, with the democratic presidential hopefuls Obama and Clinton both putting themselves online, not to mention our own sell-out pols, Mr. John "Shameless" Howard and Mr. Kevin "Not Howard" Rudd.

In the US, blogs such as the dailykos and swampland are powerful forces for the democratisation of the Fourth Estate. This is an a industry increasingly controlled by uniform megalithic corporations with a stranglehold on our collective mind space. I hearken back to the time when journalists were independent people who believed in journalistic integrity, espoused principles of transparency and avoided tabloid sensationalism - if there ever was such a time. Perhaps credible journalistic blogs that aspire to such a cause will finally fulfill the dream of newspapers past - keeping the bastards running our nations and corporations honest.

It is the pitfalls of web 2.0 that I will attempt to avoid, and the great things about it that I shall endeavour to preserve. In the closing phrase of the introduction of Shakspeare's Romeo and Juliet:

"That which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend."

Therefore, my

Manifesto:
===========================================

1. Truth: The internet is the information superhighway. If information is power, let it be an honest and truthful power.

2. Betterment: The amateur should strive for betterment while retaining the honesty and passion that promoted the endeavour in the first place - there is no glory in mediocrity.

3. Awareness of Subjectivity: If something is an opinion, then it remains an opinion - opinions (of others, and your own) are intensely informative and contribute to everyone's overall understanding of a given situation, but opinion should be separated from fact, and never become dogma.

4. Uphold the Fourth Estate: Keep the bastards honest. Fight spin with truth. Find out for yourself. Advocate that which should be advocated. Speak out against what should be spoken out against.

5. Communication: Use the internet to achieve true communication and networking. Meet different people, engage in conversations worth having, connect for the purposes of enriching your own experiences, not entrenching your current opinions.

6. Technology: The web is for connecting, so connect! Link to other articles to support arguments, demonstrate abililty to make your content more accessible to people who want to check the validity of your own reasoning.

7. The Holistic Approach: Combine principles 1-6 to make yourself more tolerant, understanding, well-educated and a superior specimen of generation Y.

Thanks for reading my drivel.