Wikipedia has always been there for me. Every well developed Wikipedia page I’ve
encountered, even those for topics in which I consider myself fairly well
versed, has always had at least some tidbit of relevant information of which I
had been unawares prior to my reading the page.
The information is so various because there are so many contributors
with so many different backgrounds.
Everyone has a different approach to prioritizing relevance and
accordingly what ends up on Wikipedia is whatever the contributors have enough
patience to find sources for and write about.
In this sense anyone can contribute as much or as little as they want
to. What we’ve ended up with is a
massive collection of sources in most imaginable fields all summarized into
concise and pleasantly readable format.
In my opinion it’s pretty enthralling literature. At the very least, if it isn’t internally
consistent, syntactically correct, and understandable then the army of
frustrated wikipedians will plow though it with edits until it meets the
community standard. While I’ve learned a
great deal from Wikipedia, I had never been fully able
bring myself to work through the editing process.
The idea has always appealed to me, but I never before felt quite like I
had nearly enough authority in any given subject. Just knowing that people around the world
would critically assess my writing and make it into something different was
intimidating. When I received the
assignment I felt rather apprehensive about how it would go. It was just a little bit too close to home. I have an awful lot of expectations from Wikipedia
articles that I’m sure others also have and I couldn’t help but worry that I
not might find anything true-seeming enough for me to comfortably post it on a
website that prides itself of acceptable truth-likeness.
The information on Wikipedia is rarely if ever exhaustive
and it’s always at least somewhat dubious.
Members of academic institutions often cite these as reasons to ignore
Wikipedia’s use as a source of information. These dismissive claims about Wikipedia’s value require the unfounded assumption that academic works don’t
have these very same faults. To be fair
however, Wikipedia, with its talk of verifiable information, is guilty of the very
same presumptuousness. I gave up on
epistemological realism a long time ago.
So far as I am concerned all knowledge is purely hypothetical. The closest thing to truth we have access to
is logical consistency between the inherently fallible beliefs that we choose
to assume. No matter what I’m reading,
watching, or listening to, I will not only call that information into doubt,
but also any knowledge that I previously assumed which would contradict my new
prospective learnings into doubt. We’ve
all got a sort of working explanation for the world around us based on our judgments
about the empirical data we’re presented with.
As the present unrolls and new empirical data slips into our system we’re
left to process it in contrast to our knowledge and make decisions about which
parts of both we can reasonably hold on to.
In most of my writing I’m able to make it very clear that what I’m
saying is counterfactual and I invite everyone reading my work to question my
work and get back to me on their concerns.
Wikipedia has people write in a very definitive so called “neutral voice”
which is a concept that upon beginning the assignment I found a little
overwhelming. I don’t trust my knowledge
enough to just openly tell people to believe it. I am uncomfortable with people taking my
writing or anyone else's without that proverbially prescribed grain of salt.
Our minds are constantly revising their content, physically
building connections between related items, and keeping track of the things it’s
decided against believing and why. It’s
our learning process, but if you think about it Wikipedia learns the same way. It’s constantly presented with differing
viewpoints that people will read and choose to either accept or deny. If anyone’s denial of a claim is normative enough
to serve as exigence, then they will take the necessary steps to revise the inconsistency. This much is true in the process of discourse
as Grant-Davie’s essay, “Rhetorical Situations and their Constituents”,
describes it. The process works just a
little differently on Wikipedia. While
people are still motivated by exigence to engage in discourse, the discourse
itself doesn’t take the same form as typical academic writing where an individual
or organization of people will author a work with the interest of motivating
others to adopt their proposed perspective, but rather the authors and the
swayable audience become the very same entity.
Everything on Wikipedia is written as though it were true, but this is ok
in this situation because we are all allowed the opportunity to change it to be
more consistent with our own working conception. Wikipedia behaves like the human mind so much
because all it is, is a collection of human minds taking turns making decisions
for it. Wikipedia is the collective unconscious.
In this sense it takes on a much
different form than typical academic writing.
Instead of being a document of motivation, it is a document of consensus. Before Wikipedia existed if we wanted access
to informational consensus we had to study a cross section of the world’s
endless supply of documents designed to pull the reader over to a shared
understanding. Once we had read enough
of these works that we could be considered an academic authority and our
writings would begin to carry a smidge of clout in the academic community.
Becoming an academic authority takes a long time though, and
even they are affected by human bias and personal agendas. Wikipedian text is constantly changing and
anything especially opinionated will be eventually removed or put into neutral
voice if enough people read it. If an article
is strikingly inadequate then that inadequacy will ideally serve as exigence for
many and the article’s weakest bits will be covered up with fresh
research. People don’t need to write
motivationally to have an impact on the collective unconscious anymore because
now there is a single place where all information is welcome and anyone can
directly change it. When I received the
assignments however, I was put into an interesting position. I had to actively search for exigence. After a good deal of flipping through the
pages in line with my own interests I ended up only learning more about my own
interests. There were certainly gaps and things I’d gladly change, but nothing
for which I could imagine writings up more than a couple sentences in neutral
voice. Neutral voice is Stressful for
me. As it were I didn’t finish the
assignment until the Wednesday after its due date because I simply couldn’t
find anything I was certain enough to write about definitively without those
little statements inviting people to doubt my statements. It was strange. I had never had a problem with
deadlines before, but for some strange reason I just couldn’t get myself to
commit to any statement. I was lost in a
discourse community that I didn’t feel worthy to contribute to. I already have a great doubt in my own
epistemology, I have even less trust in external sources because there are so
many things that can influence a writer and all I can do is guess the
motivation behind a document. Taking the
information at face value is almost universally undependable and I just wanted
to put disclaimers by every statement of fact.
Eventually I was able to get convince myself that that doubt is built in
to the very nature of Wikipedia, and after making absolute sure that my text
was in line with my sources I submitted it.
No comments:
Post a Comment