Right-wing relativism and the worth of Wikipedia

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One of the great ironies of the current administration is its insistence on its ability to determine truth. It's ironic because they end-up sounding like the post-modernist morally relativistic academic straw-people they so vehemently attacked not too long ago. I've already written about this topic, but wanted to return to it as an excuse to link to this Stephen Colbert video segment that satirizes the phenomenon using Wikipedia as the central metaphor (HT: Sullivan).



As much as I like to see right-wing reality revisionism skewered so expertly, I don't think the use of Wikipedia as a metaphor is really fair to the online encyclopedia. I actually like Wikipedia a lot. In a comparison to to the Britannica that the NYT did a while back, it held its own in many areas. (The journal Nature did a comparison and found similar results. I'm sure my readers can come up with many Wikipedia doozies (especially on highly controversial topics, or on neglected topics that don't receive much editorial scrutiny), but I don't think this Onion parody is justified from what I've seen.

Here's a fascinating bit of wiki trivia: The original Oxford English Dictionary was put together in a proto-wiki-like way. People were asked to send in definitions and quotations on scraps of paper, which were then organized by an editorial staff. A great book about this process is The Professor and the Madman. I love books about total geeks from other historical eras.

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary


Comments

Anonymous said…
I love it when right wingers complain about the liberal bias of wikipedia.
8:42 AM, August 07, 2006
grishnash said…
And now thanks to that segment, elephants are now considered a controversial subject and the Wiki article is locked down against edits. Actually, that in itself is a great rebuttal to the criticism that the entries are entirely "anything goes".
9:37 AM, August 07, 2006
Anonymous said…
Well, the type of lockdown they instituted there is a recent invention, and in fact when it first came out articles were decrying the wiki-hypocrisy of wattering down the concept with such blatant censorship. Which I think is ridiculous.
7:18 PM, August 08, 2006
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