Navigating babel

Saw an interesting article the other day, Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?, that had me thinking about the demise of expertise in our society.

Even as fields become ever more complicated and fragmented, the flattening effects of blogs and hundreds of cable channels with airtime that needs to be fed has cheapened the currency of discourse. Knowledge is no longer the entry fee--rather, it's glibness on the subject matter de jour.

Which any idiot can summon up, and actually on topics with a lot of subtlety idiots are gonna sound better to the untrained ear.

Good thing, then, that on Wikipedia there are at least a few trained ears....

Brock Read, in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Alexander M.C. Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University, has spent hours and hours wading through Wikipedia, which has become the Internet's hottest information source. Like thousands of his colleagues, he has turned to the open-source encyclopedia for timely information and trivia; unlike most of his peers, he has, from time to time, contributed his own expertise to the site.

But to Wikipedia's legions of ardent amateur editors, Mr. Halavais may be best remembered as a troll.

Two years ago, when he was teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the professor hatched a plan designed to undermine the site's veracity — which, at that time, had gone largely unchallenged by scholars. Adopting the pseudonym "Dr. al-Halawi" and billing himself as a "visiting lecturer in law, Jesus College, Oxford University," Mr. Halavais snuck onto Wikipedia and slipped 13 errors into its various articles. He knew that no one would check his persona's credentials: Anyone can add material to the encyclopedia's entries without having to show any proof of expertise.

Some of the errata he inserted — like a claim that Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, had made Syracuse, N.Y., his home for four years — seemed entirely credible. Some — like an Oscar for film editing that Mr. Halavais awarded to The Rescuers Down Under, an animated Disney film — were more obviously false, and easier to fact-check. And others were downright odd: In an obscure article on a short-lived political party in New Brunswick, Canada, the professor wrote of a politician felled by "a very public scandal relating to an official Party event at which cocaine and prostitutes were made available."

Mr. Halavais expected some of his fabrications to languish online for some time. Like many academics, he was skeptical about a mob-edited publication that called itself an authoritative encyclopedia. But less than three hours after he posted them, all of his false facts had been deleted, thanks to the vigilance of Wikipedia editors who regularly check a page on the Web site that displays recently updated entries. On Dr. al-Halawi's "user talk" page, one Wikipedian pleaded with him to "refrain from writing nonsense articles and falsifying information."

Mr. Halavais realized that the jig was up. ...

Shortly after Mr. Halavais's career as a troll ended, the professor — this time posting anonymously — contributed another article to Wikipedia, a piece on theories of communication, his area of expertise.

"It got shut down pretty quick, and I think there's just a small piece of it left online," he says. "Some other professors I talked to said the same thing happened to them: They were experts in their fields, they wrote something well in their area of expertise, and it got cut up."

The site values concision — some lengthy articles are even marked as entries that should be tightened — so detailed scholarly papers are not looked upon fondly. Peer review may be hard on a professor's ego, but Wikipedia, it seems, is even less forgiving.

And even minor editing changes can lead to frustrating debates. Mr. Rosenzweig once edited a Wikipedia article on the financier Haym Solomon, removing a false but widely held claim that the 18th-century broker had lent money to the infant U.S. government during the Revolutionary War. Almost immediately after he removed the passage, another contributor reinserted it, citing its appearance in a number of books, which Mr. Rosenzweig says have been debunked. Only a seasoned historian would be likely to know that the claim was false, he says.

Academic historians are more likely to spend their time working on projects that can earn them scholarly respect and career advancement than writing or editing Wikipedia entries. Because of its transitory nature and its ban on original research, Wikipedia "doesn't have a lot of credibility within the academy," says Mr. Halavais.

"Generally, it's a time commitment that doesn't pay off reputationally," he says. "You certainly couldn't throw it on a CV." Writing for Britannica might not put professors on the tenure track, either, but it confers a certain amount of credibility, says Mr. Halavais.

Besides, say some critics of Wikipedia, it's not clear why an expert in a given field would want to see his work diluted by laymen. In an online essay called "Digital Maoism," Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, has argued that Wikipedia is at the forefront of a disturbing Web trend — a tendency to value anonymous communal thought over individual intellect.

"A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references," wrote Mr. Lanier, who spent time as chief scientist for the engineering office at Internet2, the high-speed-networking group. "It is also an expression of personality."

Mr. Wales says most Wikipedia articles are actually written by two or three people, not an anonymous collective. But otherwise, he says, Mr. Lanier's criticism isn't so much wrong as it is immaterial. "One aspect of Jaron Lanier's criticism had to do with the passionate, unique, individual voice he prefers, rather than this sort of bland, royal-we voice of Wikipedia," Mr. Wales says. "To that, I'd say 'yes, we plead guilty quite happily.' We're an encyclopedia."

But some critics say that Wikipedia's acceptance of anonymity — many of its posters never register on the site — causes more serious problems than personality-free prose. The site's open-door policy has emboldened trolls and vandals, whose efforts many academics would rather not suffer, says Mr. Sanger. "To many professors, it seems to be a waste of time to negotiate with people who in any other context would be taking a class from them."

Mr. Wales acknowledges that the site has, at times, seemed unappealing to scholars.

"There have definitely been cases where there were academics who came to the site, made good contributions, and the rough-and-tumble of the process really turned them off," he says.

To paraphrase Rodney Dangerfield, those poor academics, they get no respect.

I generally think it's better to have more voices talking than fewer; but I do think the responsibility is on the speaker to:
-come with at least a basic base of knowledge, or else mostly listen
-to know or at least figure out where they stand on the scale from amateur to expert
-to give the benefit of the doubt to their more knowledgeable peers
-to know when someone isn't their peer
-to recognize and not let issues of ego interfere with the discussion process

Wikipedia does a pretty good job of adhering to the above, as long as you think of it as a discussion forum rather than an encylopedia.

I use Wikipedia for a lot of things; but on topics that I actually know something about, I do see a lot of plagiarism (if you're gonna rewrite news articles at least source the original!) and shallow thinking. Often that's better than the minimal knowledge I bring on a topic, which is why I turn to Wikipedia; often as not, though, I find myself jumping off it via the links. As the article points out, there are inherent limitations to Wikipedia, especially on non-fact-based topics and on those where Westerners are mypoic.

With its inherently collaborative and open nature I think Wikipedia has the potential to become much better with improved translation software and/or the entire world learning English. Heck, it could become a United Nations of knowledge, with all the promise and pitfalls therein.

Much better, in any case, than the old days of a select few white males defining the world for us--no matter how brilliant or hard-working, their world was inherently a closed one.

The Nutty Professors, Anthony Grafton in the New Yorker: Not that long ago, universities played a very different role in the public imagination, and top academics seemed to glitter as they walked. At a Berlin banquet in 1892, Mark Twain, himself a worldwide celebrity, stared in amazement as a crowd of a thousand young students “rose and shouted and stamped and clapped, and banged the beer-mugs” when the historian Theodor Mommsen entered the room:

This was one of those immense surprises that can happen only a few times in one’s life. I was not dreaming of him; he was to me only a giant myth, a world-shadowing specter, not a reality. The surprise of it all can be only comparable to a man’s suddenly coming upon Mont Blanc, with its awful form towering into the sky, when he didn’t suspect he was in its neighborhood. I would have walked a great many miles to get a sight of him, and here he was, without trouble, or tramp, or cost of any kind. Here he was, clothed in a titanic deceptive modesty which made him look like other men. Here he was, carrying the Roman world and all the Caesars in his hospitable skull, and doing it as easily as that other luminous vault, the skull of the universe, carries the Milky Way and the constellations.

Mommsen’s fantastic energy and work ethic—he published more than fifteen hundred scholarly works—had made him a hero, not only among scholars but to the general public, a figure without real parallels today. The first three volumes of his “History of Rome,” published in the eighteen-fifties, were best-sellers for decades and won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902. Berlin tram conductors pointed him out as he stood in the street, leaning against a lamppost and reading: “That is the celebrated Professor Mommsen: he loses no time.”

Uncredited photo of Wiki Wiki sign from Cruisinaltidue.com; origin of the name is here. Uncredited image of Theodor Mommsen found online on a biography page.