Atomizing truth
This post was submitted by The Review’s resident Newshound, Kato.
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The latest discussions on Wikipedia Review regarding Holocaust denial and Wikipedia - have served the purpose of triggering some reflections on my part on the nature of history, and the threat that Wikipedia’s model provides to our understanding of the past.
Some time ago I spent a period analyzing holocaust denial as an example of how history and truth is impacted by the distance of time. Since the end of the war, holocaust survivors and others have consciously stressed the importance of personal, lucid testimonies to counter what they rightly predicted would be a gradual debasing of truth. The level of diligence to this noble premise is quite unique. Spielberg’s Shoah foundation is just one of many examples.
Despite the Holocaust becoming an ever more intensely politicized subject encompassing the left and right, the guardians of the many testimonies have managed to hold onto the truth; and though skirmishes continue to rage here and there, there is almost no dispute in the Western world over the central events. Which remains a great achievement.
What is worrying, however, is the role Wikipedia will play in the debasing of history and truth on many other complex subjects. Having seen the tribulations Holocaust survivors and historians have had to endure to hold onto truth, before WP’s “democratization of knowledge”, it is difficult to imagine how truths will fare after Jimbo’s grand folly has put them through it’s mangle. The Holocaust on Wikipedia is reasonably well protected, due in large part to international court cases regarding the historiography of the events, which have established central tenets. Other less well-defined historical episodes remain in constant jeopardy.
These are serious issues and serious problems that face Wikipedia. We’re constantly told by Wikipedia zealots that “WP is not interested in the truth”. Well I am. And I remain unconvinced that Jimmy Wales has any of the credentials needed to ensure that these issues get played out to the benefit of human knowledge. The net result of Wikipedia is becoming increasingly apparent. It is atomizing truth to the level where it is in danger of losing all meaning.
To all appearances, Jimbo seems to have made a very common extrapolation of F.A. Hayek’s (I believe Jimbo proclaims himself a follower of Hayek) ideas about the prices and free markets to places where the ideas don’t apply.
In “The Use of Knowledge in Society” ( http://virtualschool.edu/mon/Economics/HayekUseOfKnowledge.html ), which every thinking person should read, Hayek distinguishes “knowledge of circumstances” from “scientific knowledge.” At the time of the essay’s writing, science and technology were at full stride in transforming society, and many of the more popular social ideas of the time can be viewed as evolving from the notion that a scientific approach - thoughtful consideration of the problem at hand and planning of an appropriate action - was the best way to approach any problem. Hence, socialism, fascism, etc.
Hayek’s insight might be seen as a recognition that creating a “rational economic order” is not so much one of figuring out which rules to apply to a known problem as it is one of defining what the problem really is. Hence, free market prices, which provide more efficient transmission of information than any command economy system available.
However, Hayek himself realized that “knowledge of circumstances” was not always the more important form of knowledge: he recognized, for example, that for many matters “the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.”
And what, ideally, goes into an encyclopedia? Monolithic truths, really. It is not a matter of a “Singapore” article properly achieving a form where all disagreeing parties are equally happy with it (which is to say, equally unhappy with it); it should, rather, have the truth, and at most respond to which truths it will contain according to what readers want from it.
And truth, regardless of what we may wish, does not inevitably arise out of open discussion: there has to be a mechanism by which to decide that one proposition has more merit than another.
And Wikipedia does have such a mechanism: revert wars and abusive administrators. But it’s a crappy mechanism, coming to be, if not entirely chaotically, only because it affirmed itself as the best method.
Had someone stepped back and asked, “What mechanism can we put into place that would best assure that article content would tend toward truth?” he would probably/hopefully not have decided upon Wikipedia’s system.
But no one ever did step back and ask this question; the project merely added rules, one by one, to react to the latest problems at hand. And this laissez-faire attitude very likely would have led to sheep farmers and cattle farmers trading wool and milk, to the betterment of all. But it does not improve the factual reliability nor the readability of an encyclopedia article on Singapore.
Dillinger
8 Aug 07 at 4:01 am
While I agree that Wikipedia’s policy basis is stupidly reactive, creating a major problem, I’m not sure that there *is* a decent metric for the “truth”. I mean, you know the truth when you see it, but how can you measure that? Some things are, after all, “truer” than others (in that there will be wider agreement that they are true, or that they will be observable and replicable, so it is pretty much “true” that Singapore is an island state in southeast Asia, and it’s “true” that 2 plus 2 is 4 in base 10). But how can you judge in disputed matters? Do you simply leave them out of your encyclopaedia? Do you set up a panel to arbitrate the “truth”? The current model — that commitment succeeds, and that empowered users can defend their own version of the truth — is poor, but I’m not sure what you’re proposing to replace it with.
Dr Zen
8 Aug 07 at 4:25 am
Re: Kato’s blog post: hopefully WP will not be around long enough to have such a detrimental impact.
Dr. Zen says: “The current model — that commitment succeeds, and that empowered users can defend their own version of the truth — is poor, but I’m not sure what you’re proposing to replace it with.”
The fact that it appears to be the only way to handle things in the WP environment is the worrying issue.
EddieElastic
8 Aug 07 at 4:46 am
Eddie, I agree. It would be a lot more constructive if “critics” spent more time thinking about the poor models that Wikipedia uses, and how they could be fixed, and less on whining about their outcomes. “Abusive admins” are only abusive because the structures they work in permit it. In their place, most of the posters to Wikipedia Review would be equally as “abusive”.
I fear that Wikipedia is not going to disappear any time soon, Eddie. If its current owners abandoned it, it would be snapped up. Dude, there must be plenty of people who would like to own a website that muscles its way into the top ten searches for most terms in Google, not least Google itself.
Dr Zen
8 Aug 07 at 5:22 am
Dr Zen is correct - the structure, which we have analysed heavily, is the primary problem with Wikipedia’s abusive admins, not the individuals themselves. People like Snowspinner would get to admin on any similar project, however elsewhere their abusive practises would lead to them being removed quickly and probably also banned. On Wikipedia the lack of accountability creates a hole for which sneaky people can create unlimited powers for themselves. And of course the seriously dangerous individuals like Jayjg and SlimVirgin go far further in manipulating the structure to their own ends.
Good to see a new person posting. For a while it was just Somey, then just me and Somey. Hopefully over time we get a whole group of people writing.
It is also good to see that our posts are getting more comments too. I think that we can say that for the moment at least, this blog, which was really just a test, has been a success.
blissyu2
8 Aug 07 at 7:39 am
“I’m not sure that there *is* a decent metric for the ‘truth.’”
There are at least better ways for measuring truth than Wikipedia’s.
Essentially, Wikipedia is a dueling game. If we wanted to promote the proposition that Pi is 22/7, EXACTLY, we could go and do it. And then we’d just play the dueling game, making sure always to pretend to assume good faith, and be civil, and not to revert three times in a day, and maybe even track down some sources that say, sort of, that Pi is exactly 22/7, and wait for the people arguing that Pi is no such thing and linking to articles on transcendental numbers (which we would dismiss, politely, as being associated with the fringe religio-philosophical Transcendental Meditation movement) to lose their tempers and become uncivil and fail (correctly) to assume good faith, and so on. And then we’d win, and Pi, in the eyes of Wikipedia, would be 22/7, exactly. The only question is whether we could muster enough people to counter however many people showed up to defend contrary views; for Pi=22/7, it would probably take an awful lot of people; but for most matters, it wouldn’t take very many at all.
The hard sciences have a good metric for deciding truth: reproduceability. Math and the social sciences have peer review, which, for non-politicized subjects works pretty well. For politicized subjects, we can’t really be sure how well it works; probably it works pretty well, most of the time, but it ultimately becomes self-referential. Zionism, for example, has created separate structures of history and even legal theory, occasionally populated by people who have succeeded in the main structures, in order to have a basis for promoting its claims. Thus, there are venues in which Efraim Karsh is considered a respected historian, though traditional historians regard him as a joke; and various experts on international law will occasionally make arguments favorable to Israel that are contrary to mainstream understanding (and that normally are not made in venues where they will be formally criticized).
Traditional academia, though, works at a very slow speed. If a group of bad seeds hijack a particular social science, they might screw it up for their working lifetimes. But the process invites criticism, so the next generation will normally start to pick apart whatever damage has been done. Or, the entire social science will fall into disrepute.
Wikipedia, however, moves quickly, and destroys as it moves. If the latest version of the Pi article claims that Pi is 22/7, it takes effort to find out that a different idea once held sway. I have, on a couple of occasions, added well-referenced evidence to dispute a generalized claim that someone was making, only to see both the original claim and the proof that it was wrong removed as being “tangential to the article.” And I expect that one day the generalized claim will be restored, without the proof that it is nonsense.
It would almost certainly be a good idea to have administrators go through re-nomination periodically. More thought would probably do well to be put to having multiple versions of articles, and letting different individuals “own” them. So, a sensible article on Pi might exist and be voted as the primary article, but a link could be included to a “Pi=22/7″ article to make it transparent that a dissenting view exists. And then people could vote on which one they think is best, without having to join revert wars.
Dillinger
8 Aug 07 at 1:54 pm
Here’s some examples of sciences in which there are nonetheless disputes that rage about what is true:
“Earth revolves around the sun VS Sun and the entire universe revolves around the Earth” - still not absolute proven, even though today 99.99% of people are quite convinced that the sun revolves around the earth.
“Earth and the entire universe was created 6,000 years ago (or in some books 9,000 years ago), humans were created before any other animals, man didn’t evolve from anything - they were the first creature VS evolution, big bang etc” - still not absolutely proven, and the literal Christian theory is actually becoming more popular nowadays. Of course, it is actually proven, but there is an argument that carbon dating is unreliable, that there are no personal testimonies, and that God himself could have changed carbon dating etc to hide his brilliance.
“Black holes suck in light, time, and everything else in to an infinite oneness VS black holes lead to a white hole on the other end, which is really a worm hole and causes no harm to objects travelling through them VS black holes do not exist” - Albert Einstein was a firm believer that black holes were really portals, and created a rather elaborate theory on them shortly before his death (although some people have suggested that it was indicative of his insanity), and furthermore the 3rd major theory, that black holes do not exist at all is also quite common. Once again, there is no absolute proof that black holes even exist, only that we have certain phenomenon which otherwise needs explaining. This is well and truly up to debate.
Then there are all sorts of theories on medicine and so forth.
Mathematics in some advanced areas is yet to be firmly established either, and there is debate on many highly advanced levels. Not so much that pi=22/7, but rather on what the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th dimensions are, and how they affect things, on chaos theory and so forth.
All of these things we all agree to produce one version of truth, because mathematicians don’t generally like to lie too much, and because the reality is that governments are the ones that are telling lies, and quite frankly it doesn’t harm them either way what they tell about issues like these. But they are still very much up to debate.
blissyu2
8 Aug 07 at 4:07 pm