Daily Blague

As a frequent visitor at Wikipedia.com, I was quick to read Stacy Schiff's "Know It All," in the current New Yorker. Not surprisingly, the crux of the story is the tension between users' desire for a reliable product and contributors' insistence upon equal standing. Vandalism and pranksters aside, Wikipedia confronts very thorny problems of accuracy. "Was Copernicus Polish, German, or Prussian?" Ms Schiff reports that

Even Eric Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired [Wikipedia founder Jimmy] Wales, argues that "'disaster'" is not too strong a word" for Wikipedia.

Kathleen is of much the same view. But when I rely on Wikipedia, I'm rarely placing very much weight on what I find. I'll be checking a birth date, or the BWV number of a Bach composition. In many cases, I'm looking for things that I could find somewhere in this room, if I were willing to get off my seat. When I come across something really new and interesting, something about which I knew little or nothing before finding out about it at Wikipedia, I seek out a second source before getting carried. away.

I have never edited a page of the encyclopedia, even when I've come across small, obviously typographical, errors. This is partly because I don't want to take the time to learn how to do it (even if it takes "no time at all"), but more because I'm afraid that I'll come back to a page and not recognize the work as my own. I've had this very unnerving experience several times on the Internet, reading an interesting quotation and really agreeing with it - wondering why I didn't say that - only to find that it was indeed I who said that. The experience leaves an agreeable afterglow, certainly, but it is creepy at first. I have a nightmare from time to time, which always ends with the realization that I am writing the text that I'm reading. I wake up shuddering, as the ink on the dreamed-of page fades to invisibility. That's what consulting myself in a reference work would be like.

For the time being, I can say that I've never encountered anything at the online encyclopedia that roused my suspicions. Given the sober subjects that I'm usually exploring, this is not surprising. I'll continue to trust my instincts when it comes to judging Wikipedia entries. Which is by way of counseling you, the gentle reader, not to put too much weight on what you may learn here!