TRUST WIKIPEDIA? HA,HA,HA,HA!

http://www.flexwiki.com/default.aspx/FlexWiki/WikiTheory.html

A “wiki”, for the sake of the culturally deprived (this is sarcasm in case there are credulous folks reading this who can’t tell) is a website that proceeds on the basis of contributions by ordinary people -- anyone who is interested, whether or not they have credentials or some kind of ambition at stake. Anyone can post anything, and then anyone else can come along and edit or add what they think. Contributions vary wildly in quality, but the idea is that over a long period of time they will average each other out and the quality of what remains will be accurate. Well, as accurate as anything ever is.

This theory is also the basis of the idea that there should be a sort of stock-market about terrorism, gambling on when and where the next strike would be. The guy that gets it right, wins the pot. The proposer was seriously suggesting that this would be accurate and a big help, that all the various guesses would actually point to something, like market research of some sort. The stock market is so accurate, right? (This is also sarcasm.) How the guesses of profit-minded Americans would lead to insight about impoverished and resentful people in other countries seemed to be outside consideration. Luckily, this idea was shouted down as ghoulish. What was next: betting on how many children would be killed? Or would someone be tempted to fulfill the prediction in order to win the pot?

Wikipedia claims the idea that they are equivalent to the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Encyclopedia Americana, which are compendia of carefully vetted articles, skillfully written and edited. This is a highly dubious claim, though I sometimes use Wikipedia to pick up some definitions or the “lay of the land” on some issue. They are most helpful with “pop” issues that young people care about. Or “wonky” stuff that pre-occupies people with a lot of spare time. Part of the success of Wikipedia comes from the body of theory that now values the “people” and their stories and opinions above those of “experts” (like those who knew our financial systems were absolutely safe). It is fed by the failures and pretensions of too many experts. I am sympathetic to the claims of Peoples’ histories, the lifting up of the stories of the minorities who heretofore never made it into the official accounts, and to the concerns of post-colonial theory, since I live in Montana (still a colony state) and I have many connections on the Blackfeet Reservation, a territory with much wealth that has been siphoned off by the powerful.

But Wikipedia has some very serious weaknesses. For one thing, it depends on high traffic and high interest, so if a lot of concerned people are monitoring and correcting the posts, the end result will probably be pretty much a consensus. But for low traffic subjects or for subject areas nearly split down the middle, there will be war or paralysis. Even more damaging is the constant reconfiguring of disciplines and paradigms in our fast-moving times. By the time someone cares enough to nail a subject, it is no longer “that subject.” But one can’t get access without conforming to that earlier definition. So, for example, it will not discuss Tim Barrus, the writer, as a whole person, but only as one of a category of hoaxers. This is like defining Teddy Roosevelt only as a “sportsman.” The subset takes over the important whole.

The other quite serious weakness is legal: maliciousness. There are people who either use the popularity of Wikipedia to spread malicious code called “malware” (there’s an entry on Wikipedia but I didn’t open it -- where else would be a more logical place to set the hook for malcode?) or who use it to libel people they don’t like or people they want to persecute for their own self-important reasons. When I googled for “google libel” and then “google malicious” the entries were in the hundreds of thousands for each.

I’m concerned because a member of the Native American lit community who is neither Native American nor American has sought to inflate his importance and credibility by using Wikipedia to spread every nasty rumor he can find about NA writers and artists. Of course, there are plenty, since these people as a group have been squashed nearly to the point of elimination but have somehow managed to survive and even to find the courage to write about it. It’s not as though this guy’s heart was in it. He remarked on his Facebook entry that he was about out of patience with the NA Lit gig and was going to start working on sci-fi as a better outlet for his talents. As far as I’m concerned, he’s been writing sci-fi all along. His understanding of Indians, and the understanding of the powers-that-be at Wikipedia, is that they are a 19th century phenomenon. They name modern self-declared “Blackfeet” with no consciousness of what that means.

So, with characteristic childish earnestness, I was thinking I was going to clue Wikipedia in, but probably because there are so MANY of these kinds of complaints, they are more filtered, fortified and redirected than Exxon gas headquarters. Good luck.

Using the People’s Power of blogging, I can tell you this. DO NOT TRUST WHAT YOU READ ON WIKIPEDIA!! AND DO NOT SEND THEM MONEY!!!

College professors mostly do not allow Wikipedia as a credible reference when students write papers. Tribal colleges are less sophisticated, using a lot of adjunct professors, and might easily think that because of the name and the popularity, Wikipedia is trustworthy. Still, they know their own tribes. Except that I see the entry on the Blackfeet is linked to one of the most mocked "professional Indians" (sarcasm) on the rez. And I’m a little dumbfounded by the many writers and so on who claim to be Blackfeet but don’t say who their grandmothers are and are not documented in spite of the huge preoccupation with the genetics of other writers.

The bottom line is that wikis of all sorts are treacherous but oddly hypnotic if you don’t think about them carefully and approach them with caution.