Something Wiki This Way Comes

I kind of hate Wikipedia.

Of course, I also love it, but the fact that I love it just makes me hate it even more, because it just proves how pervasive and powerful and influential it is. Like capitalism. Or fossil fuels.

I don’t hate it for the usual reason, though, or at least not the usual reason that you hear from teachers. (Or used to give, at least; I suppose it’s possible that the image of the teacher who rails against Wikipedia for being “unreliable” since “anyone can change it” is one of those strawmen that doesn’t really exist, although it technically does - like the special-snowflake college liberal who whines about needing a safe space anytime anyone makes a joke, or the welfare queen who spends food stamps on soda and drives a BMW. But one thing about inhabiting the education world is that you encounter people who are far more anachronistic than that: actual human beings who still teach using overhead projectors - and not as an act of Luddite-esque rebellion, which I would respect, but because they legitimately don’t understand that technology has advanced.)

I don’t hate Wikipedia because it’s not reliable, but because it’s too reliable. Too objective; too systematic. Too successful a manifestation of the (probably inescapable¹) human desire, which you can trace back to at least Aristotle, to catalog and classify knowledge. To set it all down “once and for all.” It’s overwhelming to look at. And it's so damn dry.

Start on any article and keep clicking the first hyperlink and you will
always end up  at "philosophy," which probably means something.

There was once an XKCD comic (remember those?) that likened any device² that could access Wikipedia to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, from Douglas Adams’s wonderful five-book trilogy of the same name. (Actually, I think it’s up to six now, but he didn’t write the last one, and I haven’t read it or even seen it, so I’m not counting it.) But here’s the key difference: the Hitchhiker’s Guide is, in Adams’s words, “a very unevenly edited book and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors like a good idea at the time.” Random asides and tangents; personal anecdotes; unverified speculation; jokes. All the wonderful things that would be purged from a Wikipedia entry almost immediately by its diligent team of fastidious curators.³

The Hitchhiker’s Guide has a history. Each entry was written by a specific person at a specific time, and their inconsistency reflects that.

Wikipedia has no history, only anatomy. It was written by everyone, which means it was written by no one.

Which makes it a terrible tool for learning. A fine resource - a repository of information, stored outside the self - but a horrendous teacher.⁴ I’ve probably read through hundreds of Wikipedia articles (I remember reading the one on the Weimar Republic, for some masochistic reason, during a bout of insomnia last spring), but I doubt I retained anything from any of them. To have any hope of remembering what I'm reading - or having an engaging reading experience in the moment, since retention certainly isn't everything - I need context; I need connections. I need narrative voice. I need a discernible human presence.

I don’t think this is just me; I think this is how learning works. So when my students do research in my class (as they are doing right now), I try to steer them away from Wikipedia and similar sources. This is certainly an uphill battle. Their instinct is to type a full question into the search bar and write down the first words that come up, whether they make sense or not⁵. They click links only when compelled. They have no sense that research can be not just a way to find answers but also to find new questions and avenues for future exploration.

Now, I’m partially just kvetching here. And I know, I know - it’s part of my job to teach them how to do research in a more substantial way. But at the same time, I totally get it. There is a significant part of me that craves hard, concrete, specific facts, too. Whenever I read something (or watch or listen to something with the goal of self-edification⁶), I always try to identify some discrete unit of information that I can point to as proof that I “got something” from it. Usually something like a name or a date. Useless knowledge. Crossword puzzle knowledge. Jeopardy knowledge.

When I visited London this summer, for instance, I deliberately memorized the order of monarchs from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II. A sort of souvenir, I suppose. As if my six days exploring the city would have been a waste otherwise. Or when I read a bit of Deleuze and Guattari on Thanksgiving morning (waiting for my family to wake up - I’m not that antisocial and pretentious), I made sure to mentally bookmark the word rhizome. And throughout those next couple days, I found myself thinking things like: “Wait, what was that word? It started with an r, I think . . . Oh, right, rhizome!” And because I could recall the word, I told myself I had actually learned something from the reading I had done, that it hadn’t been totally fruitless.

This is, of course, total bullshit. Being able to recall a term is not the same as actually having grappled with the ideas of difficult postmodern thinkers. But there is some part of me that thinks it is. And I am tempted to blame the education system, to blame my own teachers or the standardized-testing-industrial complex for encouraging (or, to be more generous, tolerating) it, but that becomes a little bit more complicated now that I am a teacher myself. I ask my students what they have learned from their research and they read out a definition (sounding like the hypnopaedic learners from the before-times section of Brave New World) or an utterly de-contextualized fact that wouldn’t be out of place in a Wikipedia article.

And sometimes, I’ll admit, I don’t push back because even that feels like a win with some kids. With a student who usually resists doing anything that even resembles academic work, or one who shuts down at any criticism, maybe getting them to write down that the capital of Maryland is Annapolis or whatever is better than nothing. Or maybe it is a means to an end, a way to build their confidence or develop their self-conception as a learner or establish the habit of taking notes. A starting point, not an ending.

Wikipedia may have all the information, but access to information is not the same thing as knowledge.

*

I saw a Tweet recently that said something to the effect of: “People who were alive before the Internet, what did you do when you needed to know a random piece of information like the number of feet in a mile or who was President in 1835?” I’m not quite old enough to answer that from experience (my family got the Internet - dial-up, but still - when I was around five, and when you’re that age all your questions are either extremely simple or so impossible that the greatest minds on earth could debate them for millennia and still get nowhere) but I assume that people probably either 1) lived with not knowing or 2) made something up.⁷

I mean, I’m not a huge stickler about the distinction between “want” and “need” - but there really aren’t too many situations when you would need to know either of the pieces of information mentioned above. Or any of the random crap we search on Google. Like this morning when I was wondering about who the hell “Wenceslas” was (as in “good king,” not all the other Wenceslases you might be thinking of.) Certainly not a need. Barely even a want, if we’re being honest. Whim is a better word.

There’s a scene in Don Dellilo’s White Noise - the only part of the book I remember, actually - where the narrator and his family are in the car and they’re having a conversation about something or other, and each of them is spouting off information that is clearly either made up or based on hearsay. “The family is the fundamental unit of misinformation,” Delillo says. How beautiful. And how true.

I’ll take a bit of misinformation from a human being over facts from a computer any day. "That's what's at the root of me, Alyosha; that's my creed."


¹ There is also something beautiful about the attempt to construct a perfect system. But as soon as it is constructed, it begins to calcify. To become an imposition. A new dogma. This pattern is repeated throughout history: in politics, religion, philosophy, art, education, science, etc. (My favorite example is the Protestant Reformation, which didn't take long to become even more rigid than the Catholicism it had opposed. Marxism is another good one. I've also been procrastinating a piece for over six months now in which I plan to make the case, largely from personal experience, that jazz music has done the same.) Life is constantly presenting us with new situations and so our old systems are never going to be fully adequate to address them. We must be in a constant state of revision.

² I’m assuming that, within a few years, we’ll stop distinguishing between “phones” and “tablets” and “computers” and “televisions,” since they all do the exact same things, and we’ll refer to them all by a common name. Leading contenders so far seem to be “devices” or “screens.” Put me down tentatively for Team Device, just because it sounds slightly less futuristic-dystopian.

³ I picture them as a team of snobbish, librarian types (horn-rimmed glasses, all), patrolling a museum with feather dusters at the ready, leaping into action the moment a speck of dust threatens to land on an artifact.

4 There is another XKCD comic that I can’t be bothered to find, either, which contains a line like “If you think the Internet holds all of human knowledge, you must have a pretty shallow view of what constitutes knowledge.” Which I suppose proves that XKCD is more like the Hitchhiker’s Guide than Wikipedia, since it, too, is beautifully inconsistent.

⁵ The other day, some of my seventh-graders walked in debating the question, “Is water wet?” This was an interesting discussion until one of them typed it into Google, announced to the class that no, water is not wet, and the conversation ceased, which was vaguely depressing.

⁶ Not so much when I’m watching, like, Chopped or something, although I’d also argue that mindless zoning-out in front of the TV is just as important a human experience as learning.

⁷ The answer that people gave on Twitter - go to the library - is so obviously full of shit that I don’t even feel like I need to debunk it.