Jorge Luis Borges’ classic short story “The Library of Babel” is about a universal library that contains all possible permutations of every book that has, is, or will be produced in the future. This means that it contains all potentially useable information, mixing books that are pure gibberish with versions in a more coherent form. The moral of the story is that there is a distinction to be made between knowledge and information and that without any coherence, order, or pattern imposed on a universal library, all of its information becomes quite useless.
This is the problem that faces Wikipedia. Its dream to one day bring the sum total of all human knowledge under one accessible roof has forced articles about mathematical formulae and scientific discoveries to like alongside articles about every possible species of Pokémon and other trivia. The issues of relevance and meaning persist as some articles on Pokémon are more fleshed out and better written than those on scientific discoveries. Furthermore, Wikipedia still can’t be cited as an academic source due to its low level of reliability. Even the claim that Wikipedia’s science articles have fewer or the same number of errors as those in Encyclopedia Britannica is demonstrably false when you survey how many need substantial cleanup and editing. However, there are still those who hope that Wikipedia can one day become a useful epistemological tool.
Last semester, I was in a class that participated in a Wikipedia pilot project designed to improve Wikipedia as a learning site and to foster a new generation of content creators. The final draft of the final essay had to be uploaded to Wikipedia to be subject to the evaluation and editing of the Wikipedia community (though our essay grade was determined by the professor).
My topic was the “Foxification” of news, specifically, how both print and broadcast news sources were becoming more partisan in order to reap larger profits. My paper received an excellent grade, but its Wikipedia counterpart was promptly deleted.
The cause for my article’s deletion was its somewhat argumentative structure. I had imposed a pattern on the work that did not sit well with Wikipedia’s guidelines on neutral point of view. I was accused of injecting bias into the work since I described Fox News as a conservative network (which Fox News CEO Roger Ailes readily admits) and that Sun Media’s Sun News Network utilized a similar style. The complaints on my article’s talk page didn’t deal with the central point of the article, which is that Fox News has made being political profitable and that model is being reproduced in other news sources looking to appeal to a niche audience.
One of the central problems of Wikipedia is its community. It’s not as welcoming as it should be to newcomers. There’s a certain aggressiveness that seems to come with anonymity. Reading some of the comments on my article’s talk page, it was as if I had committed some gross violation against knowledge just because my submission presented a specific line of reasoning. Not all of the comments were that angry. I received kudos for contributing such a lengthy and well-written article. However, the conclusion was that its argumentative structure disqualified it from being a Wikipedia article. One commenter went as far to say my piece was “a well-written, well-sourced analysis that does not belong in Wikipedia.”
An encyclopedia doesn’t just have to be a static reference book. It can also critically engage with its subject matter. A good online encyclopedia that is academically rigourous and useful is the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Its authors are philosophers who don’t just offer you passive information about Plato, Kant, and David Hume but present specific arguments that help to elucidate the positions of the philosophers and concepts they are profiling. Academia is about critical engagement that involves a specific thread of reasoning. Other wikis on the web dedicated to books, travel, and video games surpass Wikipedia in terms of content and coherence. And why is that? It’s because they are organized around a specific context that informs and shapes the content of the site.
As long as Wikipedia continues trying to be all things to all people, it will continue to be a Library of Babel — a repository of information and trivia that may or may not be useful to its readers — and as long as its founders and the community that surrounds Wikipedia banish any kind of critical thought, it will remain that way.
