This Is Your Education On Wikipedia, Discussion Thread Options

[Jon Awbrey]

Discussion Thread for “This Is Your Education On Wikipedia”

I'm going to try separating the discussion from the main topic — just an experiment to see if it helps me keep my brains from getting too scrambled. Feel free to post on whichever thread you find most convenient — I can always sort stuff out afterward.

Jon Awbrey

[dogbiscuit]

Milton's post elsewhere is worth adding to this mix:

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=32677&st=40

As both Thomas Jefferson and Josh Billings said, the things that really hurt you aren't the things you don't know, so much as the things you know, that just aren't so.

WP, as a summation of "knowledge," makes no progress in this area. It summarizes the things people think they "know" that just aren't so (like acupuncture and "energy medicine") with the same zeal as it summarizes the most empirically tested and toughest scientific knowledge, like the conservation of momentum and energy, or the constancy of the speed of light.

I'm one of those people who think that WP neither hurts nor helps the cause of education, but is rather neutral, like television or the internet itself. Wikipedia is sort of like a pre-accumulator of trash, something I've likened to WALL*E, whose job it is to sort out a planet-load of crap (trash, junk, and treasure) into neat piles, but has no way of telling the diamonds and the Van Goghs, from the empty pop cans and egg shells. However, the sorting process is helpful. One MORE filter (the one Sanger first proposed) will convert the sorted mess into something amazing. Those of us who use our brains and other knowledge to do that NOW, find WP very useful. The problem is that we weren't trained in epistemology by reading Wikipedia. The next generation might not have that advantage. That's what worries Jon.

Every scientist, as part of their Ph.D. or (at least) post-doc training, has a moment when they stop being an epistemological virgin, and have one or more magical moments in which they realize that for one small item, ALL the experts are wrong. They've missed something, and their underwear is showing. And this can be demonstrated in a way that makes them all blush. At that moment the student becomes part of the club of masters.

WP isn't part of that experience. It's explicitly designed not to be. And if WP is all there is, where will future generations go to avoid remaining "40 year-old virgins" when it comes to knowledge?