Nicholas Carr has a great reply to Larry Sanger’s article in Edge about Citizendium. Carr’s reply is lengthy, but a damn fine read. Sometimes I think Carr is the only one who understands basic facts like this:
Whatever happens between Wikipedia and Citizendium, here’s what Wales and Sanger cannot be forgiven for: They have taken the encyclopedia out of the high school library, where it belongs, and turned it into some kind of totem of “human knowledge.” Who the hell goes to an encyclopedia looking for “truth,” anyway? You go to an encyclopedia when you can’t remember whether it was Cortez or Balboa who killed Montezuma or when you want to find out which countries border Turkey. What normal people want from an encyclopedia is not truth but accuracy. And figuring out whether something is accurate or not does not require thousands of words of epistemological hand-wringing. If it jibes with the facts, it’s accurate. If it doesn’t, it ain’t. One of the reasons Wikipedia so often gets a free pass is that it pretends it’s in the truth business rather than the accuracy business. That’s bullshit, but people seem to buy it.
The encyclopedia is a reference source. And like I have said before, anyone who cites any encyclopedia at the end of a paper who is older than 14 needs to be reeducated. This is not a paper/digital distinction, but a “fact”/”knowledge” distinction.
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This entry was posted by Steven Chabot on Thursday, April 26th, 2007, at 9:44 am, and was filed in Digital Culture, Internet.
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