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According to Wikipedia on September 26th, 1493 Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull Dudum siquidem, the last of the Bulls of Donation, marking the beginning of the Spanish colonization of the Americas. I don’t know what this means, but it seems important, or at least useable during trivia night. Whatever it may mean, it fits in with the site’s creed. Wikipedia, besides being some of my students’ favorite way to study for exams, touts itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” The people’s encyclopedia, a repository of knowledge, by everyone and for everyone. Practically communist of them.
I won’t spend any more time explaining what Wikipedia is to you all. If you’re reading this, you’re more aware of the internet than most people. Hell, odds are you looked at something on Wikipedia today. Probably a celeb’s birthday, or trying to figure out whatever that vegetable you saw at the farmer’s market was. All perfectly normal ways to use Wikipedia.
Back to the Pope. Pope Alexander VI. Clicking on that link leads me to an entire page about this specific guy, also known as Rodrigo de Borja. Yes, those Borgia’s, just a more Spanish-inflected spelling. Following a few more links leads me to any number of pages. I could learn about the University of Bologna, or the second Italian War, or what a condottiero is. Amazing. A plethora of knowledge. The world’s knowledge is at my fingertips. I could scroll through this all night.
In Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, a truly fantastic sci-fi novel that tells its story in a similar fashion to The Canterbury Tales, there is something called “the datasphere.” Below is Simmons description of it.
“The datasphere was a construct delight that first year—I called up information almost constantly, living in a frenzy of full interface. I was as addicted to raw data as the Caribou Herd were to their stims and drugs. I could imagine don Balthazar spinning in his molten grave as I gave up long-term memory for the transient satisfaction of implant omniscience. It was only later that I felt the loss—Fitzgerald’s Odyssey, Wu’s Final March, and a score of other epics which had survived my stroke now were shredded like cloud fragments in a high wind. Much later, freed of implants, I painstakingly learned them all again.” (199).
This section, first published in 1989, gets at one of the main problems with Wikipedia. While obviously the datasphere and Wikipedia are different, especially in that one of them is fake and not real, Simmons description of data addiction, and the idea of substituting long-term memory “for the transient satisfaction of implant omniscience,” is prescient. I, like many others, have spent hours on Wikipedia aimlessly clicking through various pages, ingesting terabytes worth of data, but remembering next to none of it within minutes of reading it.
Wikipedia is not necessarily the problem here. While it is set up to encourage clicking around, it’s interlocking hyperlinks and article stubs that pop up when hovering over them are all designed to keep people on the site, the website itself is more a side effect than the actual cause of the problem.
The problem, as I see it, is the regurgitation of information/data/facts into content. “Top Ten Most Interesting Science Facts” articles, “This Day In History” pieces, TikTok historians, and other such things all do this. The contentization – that’s a made-up word, let’s try commodification instead – of facts has a lot of negative outcomes. It encourages the decontextualization of information, promotes a “more is better” approach to information, and discourages deep reading on your own.
Encyclopedias and supposed compendiums of world knowledge have been around for a while. In “the West” at least, Denis Diderot is probably the most famous encyclopedia guy. His stated definition and goal, and this quote is pulled from Wikipedia, so take it as you will, was, “An encyclopedia ought to make good the failure to execute such a project hitherto, and should encompass not only the fields already covered by the academies, but each and every branch of human knowledge." This I think is a noble, but impossible goal. Knowledge is a form of power, not the only form, but an important one. I wholeheartedly believe that the more information is available to more people the better off our world will believe. I do not have a problem with encyclopedias.
My problem comes with how this information is presented and used. The internet, and especially Wikipedia are not neutral arbiters of information. Wikipedia’s democratic tagline is deceiving. While it certainly can be edited by everyone, in truth, it is not. There are a core number of users who edit the large majority of articles. It also in many places bows to state power, removing, editing, and otherwise augmenting articles based on requests from governments. The form itself also leaves a lot to be asked for. That event I talked about in the beginning? It’s not really clear if it actually did happen on September 26th 1493. In 1493 the Western world, where this event takes place, used the Julian calendar, which is different from our modern day Gregorian calendar. While the changes made from the Julian to Gregorian calendars are minor, they are enough to make a difference. Wikipedia does not provide this information in any way and you’d have to know about the calendars on your own to even ask this question.
That example is a relatively minor one, but revealing, I think. Wikipedia, and encyclopedias in general, are bad at providing context. Facts, without context are almost entirely useless. Knowing that Pope Alexander VI issued a bull a couple hundred years ago around this date doesn’t help anyone outside of participating in a very religious history heavy bar trivia game. How that piece of info becomes important is through context. The problem is that context is hard to put into a listicle that you can sell ad space next too, or in Wikipedia’s case guilt people into fundraising for. It’s hard to get addicted to context. Context requires long-term memory.
So do I think Wikipedia should be banned? No! How else will college students figure out what the Anti-Imperialist League is? The world needs somewhere to put its confusingly written summaries of hit movies. But it also shouldn’t be treated as the end all be all of knowledge. It’s written by people, people who often have agendas. It’s flawed in countless ways. But remembering that sometimes, you don’t really need to know what all the cultivars of squash are.
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