Wikipedia and the nature of truth | Perspectives | CNET News.com

Wikipedia and the nature of truth | Perspectives | CNET News.com:

A fascinating question is posed here on the nature of knowledge and truth. Is the collective wisdom of the group/crowd sufficient for discerning worldly fact and truth and reporting it accurately? There's a strong argument to be made on both sides of the debate.

Experts in particular fields have heretofore written and edited encyclopedias. Timeliness and coverage was always a problem with the printed version creating a business model that included annual updates. But we generally believed that accuracy was assured as best as humans are able be cause there was a financial/ethical incentive to be correct

The same expertise can be brought to bear in the Wikipedia model, but the only accountability for accuracy is random editing by other experts and wannabes. Is the 'public good' sufficient incentive for people to freely build and encyclopedia that is always the best in the world's this enough to assure users that what they read and reference is the best?

It may be too early to know because Wikipedia, though robust, remains in its infancy as a trusted source.

Here's the New York Times take on false postings in Wikipedia.

In the longer term, I think the open source Wikipedia model will prevail for the public good.

"On your ride home today, try pondering a future where Wikipedia's model of competing versions of the truth becomes the norm. Will the increasing influence of the wisdom of the crowd force us to rethink the nature of knowledge? With the proliferation of the Internet, more voices inevitably will become part of that conversation.

You can argue that epistemological revisionism goes on all the time. As a kid, I remember thumbing through a 1920s encyclopedia when I found a discussion of different racial categories. Someone reading the entry decades later would have found the assertions in that article to be nonsensical, if not borderline racist. But when the book was published, the people who might have corrected the record had no power over the publishing company printing up the product line. With the Internet, anyone with an online connection can chime in."