| The Information Conservatives |
When Wikipedia started, I guess I had some sort of misconceived notion that it would become a compendium for all human knowledge. And while it started to look that way for a while, there’s a problem in that dream that is just now coming into focus, after more than two million articles have been created and most of the “essentials” have been covered. Wikipedia is not the postmodern Library of Alexandria it has the potential to be, because (according to some) Wikipedia Is Not An Indiscriminate Collection of Information. In order to be included in Wikipedia, an article must have an attribute called notabilty. But who decides what is notable? There are currently 1,360 unpaid community administrators who are given the authority to control the fate of new Wikipedia entries, as the only ones with the power to delete entire pages. They determine if a page is worthy for inclusion based on Wikipedia’s notability policy: The topic of an article should be notable, or “worthy of notice”. This concept is distinct from “fame”, “importance”, or “popularity”. A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. So essentially, on Wikipedia nothing is eligible for inclusion until it has received enough coverage from reputable outside sources. Sure, Paris Hilton is notable– she’s been analyzed from every angle on every level of culture– but what about a butcher shop in South Africa called Mzoli’s Meats?
That question seems simple enough, but has sparked a huge debate covered by news outlets from the LA Times to the English paper The Telegraph. Apparently, there are two factions of administrators, diametrically opposed on the issue of notability. From The LA Times: Inclusionists believe that because Wikipedia is not bound by the same physical limits as a paper encyclopedia, it shouldn’t have the same conceptual limits either. If there’s room for an article on unreleased Kylie Minogue singles — and a group of people who might find it useful– why not include it? What could these “Deletionists” see in the aforementioned conceptual limitations of traditional encyclopedias? What could be wrong with hosting all the information in the world on one easily accessible, searchable server? Isn’t that the vision of so many sci-fi fantasies– a world where our robot pals could answer any question in the bounds of human knowledge instantaneously, with implied access to a centralized database containing all information? Check out The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump, a blog devoted to rescuing information before it’s eradicated from Wikipedia. And for a first-hand look at the douchebag reasoning behind Deletionist attitudes, check out this Cracked.com article entitled “The 8 Most Needlessly Detailed Wikipedia Entries“. Note that since that article’s publication, several of the articles it heckles have been purged from Wikipedia– literally tens of thousands of words expunged because someone thinks it’s funny that there might be a demand– however slight– for plot descriptions of “7th Heaven” episodes!
Information is never needless! As the chart in this video explains, knowledge is power! But beyond that obvious assertion, we must come to realize that trivia is important, and beautiful. To quote two kindergarten philosophies in one paragraph, there are no stupid questions. Everything is important as long as any person, regardless of their significance, has the desire to know about it. Minutia is glorious! Divorced of the self, we are all merely information stored in other people’s brains– neurons filed away in an unknown cranial cabinet until death or senility renders those life-long memories moot. We never truly die until we cease to exist as information. Gravestones are less for presenting corpse coordinates and more for saving the names inscribed upon them from the same grisly fate that has claimed their owners. Hence, information is the same as life. Deletionism is genocide. I am a believer in the viability of Borges’ life-sized map of the world. Why not? |
The reason Mzoli’s Meats caused such a debate is that the entry was created by Jimbo Wales, the cofounder of Wikipedia. Had it been created by anyone else it would have be summarily deleted.
The problem is signal vs. noise and it doesn’t sum as neatly as you made it sound here. There is a difference between information and knowledge. The Internet already serves as an indiscriminate collection of human information, but the point of Wikipedia is to provide a general overview of collective human knowledge and to organize it in a readily accessible way. If someone wants to detail the minutiae of 7th Heaven, I say go for it, but there’s a line between providing useful knowledge and simply fact-dumping. Knowledge is the ability to cull meaning from information.
There is also a difference between fact-dumping and fact-organizing. The internet is flawed as an indiscriminate collection of facts, because there are so many varied interfaces and standards, its content is transient and prone to disappear at the drop of a hat, and there is no way to communally edit information. Wikipedia provides a structure for collecting all the information that is littered on the Internet’s rocky shores, and presenting it in a manageable fashion.
As you say, Wikipedia wants to present knowledge in a readily accessible way– unlike with a paper enycolpedia, including fifty extra pages of 7th Heaven episode summaries isn’t going to make anything on Wikipedia less accessible. Users aren’t going to have trouble finding the page about the Pacific Ocean just because there’s a page about Mzoli’s Meatballs taking up space. They won’t even know it exists unless they look for it, at which point they’ll find what they’re looking for in a useful, informative structure.
good Baudrillard ref!
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