If Google is God, then what does that make Wikipedia? As the online open source encyclopedia has increasingly become the first resource people consult in their quest for knowledge about a particular topic (just as Google is the default for searching the internet), like clockwork the usual suspects have come out of the woodwork to knock Wikipedia's accuracy, reliability, and overall usefulness as a reference work. Now mind you, if Wikipedia is your only research stop, then yes, you're doing something terribly wrong, but to me there's no quicker and more efficient way of obtaining a general overview about something -- from deconstructionist theory to the history of the Green Lantern Corps. Granted, the open-source nature of Wikipedia leaves it open to potential mischief and the occasional amateur's mistake, but entries that are deliberately sabotaged tend to be righted again with due diligence, and few errors of fact remain for long under the watchful eye of several hundred thousand copy editors.
As a way of putting this mass of self-correcting intellectual firepower to the test, Esquire magazine author A.J. Jacobs posted a sloppy and ill-researched article about Wikipedia on Wikipedia, encouraging the fact-checkers to have at his opus and see if they couldn't whip into publishable shape. Within 48 hours the article went through over four hundred revisions, transforming Jacobs' bad term paper into something resembling a scholarly article. Chief among the faults enumerated by Wikipedia's disparagers is that while its entries are constantly updated, said revisions shouldn't be confused with an asymptotic progression towards the "truth". Granted, Wikipedia tends to be least reliable when dealing with matters of interpretation and analysis rather than fact, as successive authors tend to try and one-up the last or reverse a perceived ideological bias. One wonders if there shouldn't be alternative entries for Wikipedia's "hot button" topics, especially those concerning religion, politics, and current events (though that sort of tokenism tends to reinforce the idea that there is no potential middle ground on the thorniest of subjects and that people should entrench themselves all the more in their blinkered thinking rather than attempting to seek out common ground).
But when it comes to facts -- especially on esoteric topics that traditional encyclopedias and other reference works tend to ignore, like pop culture, television shows, and comic books -- it's hard to find a source more comprehensive than Wikipedia. I suspect that part of the professionals' animus towards it stems not from the fact that Wikipedians get so much wrong, but that they get an awful lot right, often with far more detail than any lettered expert or expensive tome deigns to share with the lay public. Sure, you may have a Ph.D. in anthropology, but there's a person out there who's spent as much time as you have on your thesis about cultural representations of Vlad the Impaler watching, rewatching, and discussing Buffy the Vampire Slayer who's probably going to school you when it comes to writing about creatures of the night. I'm working towards a Masters in history, but I would never dare attempt to speak authoritatively about the Battle of Manassas when I know that there are hundreds of thousands of Civil War buffs out there who not only know what happened and when but are likely to have recreated the battle itself with uniforms and all!
Wikipedia threatens to democratize scholarship, just as Google threatens to democratize knowledge. And that frightens the hell out of anyone who has committed themselves to a world where only the professionals are qualified to think deep thoughts and write erudite articles. If the future of intellectual inquiry is open source, then who will continue to underwrite the current system of knowledge production that has turned higher education into the nigh for-profit racket it has become? Google and Wikipedia are in the middle of turning the entire enterprise of scholarship on its head, so it's little wonder why the tenured professors and established authorities of the traditional academy are crying foul -- simply put, the future doesn't need them, and they know it.
(More about Google Print later today!)
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