A carnival of technology

The Internet has changed significantly since 1994. Ignoring the commercial element, the nature of how people distribute information has shifted. The idea of protocols tailored to the tasks of distributing certain types of information has disappeared, leaving the habits of the Web to drive the direction of the Internet as a whole.

I’m going to make some unfounded speculations and historical generalizations based solely upon memory, but I hope that my points remain. Once the frontier of the Internet was opened up to the masses, it quickly became a resource for anyone to publish their ideas, no matter what their commercial viability. The advantage in this is that unpopular and marginalized ideas have a place to voice themselves without fear of backlash, becoming a new realization of the ideal of freedom of press. This ultimate freedom also made the Web into a vehicle for libel and unfounded conspiracy theories, but all of this is simply part of the rich pageant of humanity: every fringe is given a voice. The Web was the place chosen as the media for these newly freed data due to its easy access for both publishers and readers, and other reasons that I don’t care to elaborate. From the reader’s point of view, the Web offered an infinite landscape of information—accurate and otherwise—and entertainment. In the early days, the habit of the web user was to maintain and exchange lists of links, so that pictures of pornography involving only carefully arranged furniture and articles explaining how Zoroastrians secretly control the one world government were available at one’s fingertips.

One-shot articles hold limited appeal for the bored browser of the Web, however, and it was eventually the sites that offered continually updated content that attracted the world’s attention. From this came blogs, where anyone could easily publish their recurring content for all the world to see. The blog also provides a means for those of us who don’t believe that the Illuminati is behind JFK’s assassination to have our voice heard: we don’t have the ideas for such articles, so articles are written about the mundane, instead. Obviously, I, too, am a part of this trend. I enjoy writing, and the Internet provides an outlet for my vanity by allowing me to publish my meaningless content at no cost. However, when compared to traditional writing, blogs are really lame. Using myself as an example again, I have a very limited supply of ideas, I have no formal training in journalism, and I am entirely unqualified to publish anything of merit. My best hope is that exposure to literature and years of language classes have provided me with some ability to creatively manipulate English. Blogs in general have no specific purpose, but they provide a method for publishing to a limited audience unpolished articles that, in general, would fail if distributed through more traditional means. In this sense, blogs are good for their writers and for a handful of readers.

There is something even more lame than the blog, attempting to establish itself as the new means of information distribution: the wiki. Wikis take the pointlessness of blogs and make them unrestrictedly editable, removing one of the few redeeming qualities of the blog. With a blog, there is a level of consistency. On this site, I am the reporter, proofreader, and editor-in-chief. I’m not qualified to be any of these, but I have the final and only say on just what appears on gophernet.org. Readers are left to decide only whether I write well or not. Wikis, on the other hand, are based on the belief that collaboration is the ultimate vehicle for information disbursement, that the act of connecting the world is the ideal way to improve humanity, rather than innovation, or even accuracy. Of course, I’m talking about Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an intrusion of the cavalier wiki upon the hidebound world of fact, which Wikipedia’s fans see as the natural progression of collaboration into every reach of society, and which its detractors, like me, see as really dumb. To say that a wiki, any wiki that permits anonymous edits, is in any way authoritative is to cheapen information on whatever topics it covers. To say that a wiki is a reliable repository of all information displays a level of a level of confidence and hubris that is nearly unfathomable.

The core idea of Wikipedia is that articles, regardless of their value at any particular point in their lifetime, will eventually converge upon a state of fact and polished style. Anyone who has attempted to write a large essay with more than three authors ought to know that this is foolish. Since the content of any page is open to change by anyone, roving ignorance and sloppy edits can mortally deface articles, and the only oversight is the thousand eyes reading it, who, since they’re searching for information on a subject, are likely to be even more ignorant on the matter than the authors of the article. Everyone is a journalist, everyone is a copy editor, and everyone has total control over what is published. A few highly unscientific experiments by myself and David Cantrell have revealed that it often takes little more than bullshit stated authoritatively to embed inaccuracy in an article. Large edits and significant changes to popular articles are spotted, but blatantly inaccurate sentences are most often ignored. I don’t know much of the internal culture of Wikipedia, but I suspect there exists a group of people who take it upon themselves to watch the list of changes for vandalism, and, since it would be highly unlikely for all fields of knowledge to be covered by this group, small edits that don’t consist entirely of swear words are likely to be ignored, leaving only the poor seekers of knowledge to realize that vending machines don’t really know anything about differential equations.

Vandalism isn’t as much an enemy to Wikipedia as ignorance. As noted in some of the articles mentioned at the end of this one, people just plain don’t know what they’re talking about, and they often don’t know how to say it, either. Factual, grammatical, and stylistic errors are encouraged—through the encouragement that anyone write articles, no matter how rough—with the belief that errors will eventually be eliminated by the omnipresent thousand eyes. This simply isn’t going to happen. The thousand eyes are just as ignorant, untrained, and unexpressive as the poor sap who wrote the article to begin with. Convergence on a polished article can only occur if each edit is made by someone more knowledgeable or skilled at writing than the person who made the last, but instead new misinformation and errors are introduced at each step along the way, leading to a constant level of mediocrity.

Normally I wouldn’t care what some random band of people are pretending is fact, but Wikipedia annoys me in two specific ways: they claim to be authoritative, and they show up far too often on google searches. Authority cannot be derived from its opposite, and their prevalence is likely a sign that unwary users of the Web are being lured into their trap, making this ideal a disservice to mankind. I don’t mind wikis, mostly because they tend to stay under my radar; the methods of disseminating information on the software engineering trend of the week isn’t something that I particularly care about. But when a wiki claims to be authoritative for all things, that is overstepping its bounds. The best fate for Wikipedia now is that it be forgotten, lest it continue to erode humanity’s knowledge.

Further reading:
http://www.burdell.org/?p=314
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/23/wiki_fiddlers_big_book/
http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html