"The Wikipedia Story" on BBC 4 Choice

This topic tickled my interest in a way I dimly recall from the "pre-political awareness" era of my education, so many many years ago. Topics of importance to me now are often soaked in the sour milk of political debate, just contentious enough in simultaneously boring and annoying ways to put everyone off the track of real intellectual progress. The democratization of knowledge and of knowledge-gathering, though, is cool, and might amuse you too.

In my mind, the arguments for and against Wikipedia always last about two seconds, in which I think, "you don't know and can't trust authors.... but who defines authority, anyway?" And then I remember that no intellectual should ever quote from any form of encyclopedia in any case (since encyclopedic knowledge is considered common and general), and call the whole thing off.

The podcast got me thinking more deeply about the comparison between online and book-form encyclopedias. Here are a couple of highlights that might get you listening to the program (which is only 27 minutes long):

• "All information on [Wikipedia] is as important as any other piece of information. The intellectual foundation of Wikipedia, then, is an intellectual anarchism, a radical intellectual relativism: everything is miscellaneous." (Andrew Keen)
• If you correct an article that is particularly politically contentious (something on environmentalism, for example), you may trigger a "revert war." Someone else can click to revert the article back to its previous state, after which you can revert it back to include your corrections, ad infinitum. This can discourage experts, who prefer not to engage with idiots, from submitting their knowledge to the pool, even though their knowledge is based on scientific research.
• There is no way to distinguish between exceptional and misleading Wiki articles - but you could make the same argument about early Britannica articles.

Before you get too excited about contributing the contents of your noggin to the sum of human knowledge, consider my plight: apparently, some asshole in my neighbourhood has been abusing his Wiki-privileges, presumably inscribing Wiki-graffiti on pages that interested him, thus having himself and, well, me, excluded from the democratic process of Wiki-intelligence-gathering. Many thanks, you big nerd.