On Wikiality

...because it's this or do actual work that I need to finish before I leave. Pfft.

"Wikiality" really is a fantastic word, and Colbert deserves some kind of award for that (and, of course, "truthiness"). They are ingenious words not only because the concepts themselves are interesting but they so utterly capture the nature of the United States under Bush. I feel I may have made this observation before, but I can't help but note how utterly ironic that the neocon evangelical "the Bible is the Truth!" President is the one that turned reality itself into an exercise in relativity. In Bush's world, facts are utterly irrelevent. All that matters is what people _think_ the facts are. It is objectivity by majority vote. It is quintessential wikiality.

...which brings us to the subject at hand: my intense dislike for the phenomenon of Wikipedia. At core, it boils down to the fact that Wikipedia takes the worst part of democracy and pushes it to its logical extreme. Nobody seems to get that the "majority rules" part of democracy is not, in fact, its best feature but instead its _worst_. The reason that democracy is such a powerful tool is because it is one of the few forms of government that ensures that one's leaders are responsible to the governed. It just happens that the way this is accomplished is through majority voting. In some senses though, that particular aspect of democracy is merely a side effect. It is merely a means to the end of a responsible government, and a lot of times it's a downright shitty means. Mobs have a way of doing profoundly shitty things. Just ask your average black person in Alabama. The problem is that we just haven't come up with anything better, because every other system you can dream up allows a despot or aristocracy to rule with impunity. Doesn't humanity suck? Because people are so goddamn greedy and self-centered, we have to sacrifice expertise on the altar of responsiveness.

So, it is with deep frustration that I observe Wikipedia. Through the lense I just described, Wikipedia has the idea of populism and democracy utterly ass backwards. What is the responsibility that Wikipedia seeks through popular participation? Does it envision a cloistered academic elite that refuses to admit scientific fact for due to some kind of perverse and inscrutable self-interest?

If so, what horseshit. The academy is one of the few areas of life that hasn't been overwhelmingly tainted by politics, and it does and always has prided itself on its subservience to evidence. Granted, scientists do have a vested interest in hanging on to their own pet research, but the rest of the scientific community has a vested interest in advancing the field even if that means stepping on some egos along the way. It is the one area where you _don't_ have to sacrifice expertise to responsiveness. And yet, Wikipedia righteously does so anyway. Hooray!

Moreover, the modern world of science (and by science, I mean the general practice of evidence-substantiated research, a broad definition meant to include a much wider range of topics than the purely hard sciences) is so complicated that we are often beyond the point where amateurs can contribute meaningfully or, more importantly, reliably. In other words, we _need_ experts, and we need to know that scientific knowledge is coming from experts.

...which brings us back to Wikipedia. At its very core, Wikipedia shuns the idea of experts. It's quintessential thesis is that there are no experts and that all voices are equal. And when it comes to human knowledge, that idea should absolutely terrify you. And anger you.

Now, I will admit that an advantage of Wikipedia is that it serves the "long tail" quite well, i.e., you tend to be able to find very obscure topics in Wikipedia that it is very difficult to find elsewhere. I agree that this is a good thing. But achieving that long tail effect shouldn't sacrifice expertise.

So have an internet repository of knowledge. But don't let the voices of the idiot masses drown out the minority of experts.