Wikipedia: Dissent as part of the truth.

Bob Stein finally helped me click on what is fundamentally and philosophically important about Wikipedia. People would like to believe that it is the open-source model, the bazar where everyone has a hand in helping, and from there greatness, or the blurring of producer/consumer. I don’t think so at all, and I don’t think it is particularly unique (just look at the creation of the OED as outlined in Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The uniqueness of Wikipedia is that, unlike the traditional models of creation, dissent is included in the presentation. That is, unlike a traditional encyclopedia which might frame a debate as entirely or mostly one-sided, the collaborative nature of Wikipedia illustrates how ideas work in the real world. Most topics, especially as you move away from the purely abstract to the purely concrete, don’t exist in a state of total one-sided consensus. If there is a heated debate surrounding a topic or issue, is that not in itself worthy of being known by the end user, by the very fact that it allows the reader to make an educated choice for his- or herself? Is it not information, part of the truth of the issue that such a debate exists?

While Britannica might make a note of the fact that “A certain minority of scientists disagree with the mating habits of the chimpanzee, and believe X opposed to Y,” a well-written Wikipedia article (and I don’t think this even approaches a majority) will have the same debate going on on a microcosmic scale right in the article and talk pages. A well-sourced article will have the sources for the debate right in the talk pages and the footnotes.

Again, I think at times Wikipedia is very bad, but when it is good, it is good in an entirely different way than the traditional model: not for its writing quality, but for its ability to allow dissent, not just with a single passing note, but within its very structure, within the structure of the article itself.

Bob writes:

The Wikipedia is a quite different sort of publication, which frankly needs to be read in a new way. Jaron focuses on the “finished piece”, ie. the latest version of a Wikipedia article. In fact what is most illuminative is the back-and-forth that occurs between a topic’s many author/editors. I think there is a lot to be learned by studying the points of dissent; indeed the “truth” is likely to be found in the interstices, where different points of view collide.

I agree to an extent, but I would frame it this way: it is not just that truth is found in the collision, in the “interstices” of the collision, but that the truth necessarily includes the collisions, as wholly part of itself, without assimilation, synthesis or aufgehoben.

I think this is somewhat of an enlightening notion, that we can go beyond the childishness of the debate to include the debate itself in our worldview