Wikipedia Lies

Long, long ago, in a social galaxy far, far away, my first journalism professor described Reader's Digest as the most viciously dishonest magazine in the United States. This set most of us aback; Reader's Digest was to us a boring magazine that our grandmothers doted on, full of harmless little articles and a handful of funny but familiar jokes.

Then he set us straight. Going on for more than an hour, he described his ideals for journalism, explaining how the Digest subverted them month after month, lying to its readers about the scpe of its coverage, lying to them about its claim to nonpartisanship and neutrality, lying to them, most of all, about its seductive but utterly barren claim that reading the Digest was a sound way to keep reasonably informed about America and the world, covering some subjects fairly and comprehensively, giving guideposts to follow to learn about the rest.

As Mary McCarthy might have said, every word the Digest printed was a lie, not excepting "a" and "the".

Wikipedia is the Reader's Digest of the World Wide Web, a bloated, self-aggrandizing, and thoroughly unprincipled affair run by a sorry batch of con artists who have convinced not only many readers but, even more sadly, themselves, that they hold the keys to enabling the world to access the full realm of human knowledge. It is the same false claim the Digest made years ago, just written larger as a greater falsehood.

I'll talk about Wikipedia's actual articles often enough here, but my immediate provocations, deserving attention, involve people (and a newspaper) talking about Wikipedia.

Yesterday the New York Times printed an article explaining how Wikipedia's claim to be a free, communal, enterprise, "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", wasn't true any more. It wasn't a very good article, since Wikipedia had been flying those colors falsely for a few years, but it has the Wikilluminati up in arms against the Times on their semipublic "mailing list" that's hard to find and harder still to be admitted to (despite claims of openness). I'll talk about the article more when the dust finishes mushrooming, but what I found more interesting was the response on that mailing list to a user's announcement that he was leaving the Wikipedia project, with some pointed comments about Wikipedia's failure to live up to its ideals.

Wikipedia, you must see, prides itself on its "civility". Users must be "civil" to each other or be blocked from editing and commenting. Users must "Assume Good Faith" about each other, and should not criticize each other or make uncomplimentary suggestions about motives without real, strong, evidence to back up their words. The mailing list must be particularly civil, inhabited by the most important and most influential of the Wikilluminati, must it not?. It is the only place in Wikipedia where founder and "god-king" Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales speaks regularly. It is where the inner circle gathers.

But what do we read there? What is the response when an adept, highly skilled, well-educated, articulate user who has made valuable contributions on difficult subjects like mathematical category theory, the work of Alfred Tarski, and the technical aspects of linguistics, a published academician, can no longer tolerate Wikipedia's less savory aspects? He is attacked as a "Mark 1 Disgruntled User" and his comments are described as "fatuous"; his comments are summarily dismissed (without explanation) as a malicious gesture to "blacken" Wikipedia's reputation; and his writing is mocked as subliterate, the effort of someone who does not actually speak English (as though this is somehow an appropriate criticism of someone drawn from a worldwide pool of editors). These comments do not come from run-of-the mill Wikipedians, but from administrators and, in two cases, from the inner circle of the Wikilluminati, two of the dozen or so members of the "Arbitration Committee," the semi-secretive Masters of the WikiUniverse, who day after day chastise and punish Wikipedians for making the same sort of mean-spirited comments about other editors. What is the explanation for this dissonance, this unfairness, this apparent distancing from the ideals Wikipedia so proudly proclaims?

Wikipedia lies.