The world’s largest encyclopedia became the factual foundation of the web, but now it’s under attack. [Archive]
A lie might be more plausible or useful than a fact, but it lacks a fact’s dumb arbitrary quality of being the case for no particular reason and no matter your opinion or influence. History once rewritten can be rewritten again and becomes insubstantial. Rather than believe the lie, people stop believing anything at all, and even those in power lose their bearings. This gives facts “great resiliency” that is “oddly combined” with their fragility. Having a stubborn common ground of shared reality turns out to be a basic precondition of collective human life — of politics. Even political power seems to recognize this, Arendt wrote, when it establishes ideally impartial institutions insulated from its own influence, like the judiciary, the press, and academia, charged with producing facts according to methods other than the pure exercise of power.
Wikipedia has come to play a similar role of factual ballast to an increasingly unmoored internet, but without the same institutional authority and with its own methods developed piecemeal over the last two decades for arriving at consensus fact. How to defend it from political attacks is not straightforward. At the conference, many editors felt both that attacks from the Trump administration were a genuine threat and that being cast as “the resistance” risked jeopardizing the encyclopedia’s position of trusted neutrality.
“I would really argue not to take the attack approach, to really take the passive approach,” said one editor when someone broached the idea of actively debunking some of the false information swamping the rest of the internet. “People see us as credible because we don’t attack, because we are just providing information to everyone all the time in a boring way. Sometimes boring is good. Boring is credible.”
It’s been neat watching Wikipedia’s transition from shorthand for “you can’t trust what you read on the internet” to whatever the hell it is now. Consider me Team Wiki. Meanwhile, the header image explained:
“A 2019 study published in Nature found that Wikipedia’s most polarizing articles — eugenics, global warming, Leonardo DiCaprio — are the highest quality…”