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March 1, 2007
A new kind of Anthem: There have been some Ayn Rand-like realizations on the Internet over the course of the past few months that all this group think may be dangerous. MSNBC reported earlier this week that "meetings make us dumber," citing a study that found people have a tougher time coming up with alternative solutions to problems when they are part of a group.
Now the mighty New Yorker, famous for its thorough fact checking, is fessing up that they, along with the collectively authored online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is fessing up that it was duped by a 24-year-old who falsely claimed he was a professor:
At the time of publication, neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay’s real name. Essjay’s entire Wikipedia life was conducted with only a user name; anonymity is common for Wikipedia admin-istrators and contributors, and he says that he feared personal retribution from those he had ruled against online. Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia—a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia—as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions. He did not answer a message we sent to him; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.” And here lies the problem of the Internet, a haven for the lazy and people prone to group think. If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, we're all only as smart as Essjay. I'll admit that whenever I'm diving into a new topic Google is almost always my first stop, and the plainly-written Wikipedia entries that come up at the top of almost any basic search are a quick read for getting an overview of a topic.
Still, I spent a good 45 minutes of my two-hour class last night trying to convince my students that while the Internet is the greatest research tool ever created, there are other research tools that will help them verify the information they find on the Internet and not make New Yorker mistakes. I didn't have to work as a journalist in the pre-Internet days when every document had to be tracked down with a trip to the court house and every address had to be confirmed with a phone call, and now I'm getting to see the lives of students in the post-Internet generation when research -- and sometimes tailor-written term papers -- are always a few mouse clicks away.
The discussion was a tangent from our advertised topic, which was generating ideas and finding things to write about. The idea was for the students to stumble upon the realization that the best topics to write about are the things we draw from our own personal experience, and the best way to research those topics is to do the legwork and not rely exclusively on a computer (this, of course, is coming from a guy who found the subject for his first book on Craigslist, but the 2+ years of legwork between reading that ad is the difference between a book and a very short blog entry. In a sense, I used that ad to create a set of personal experiences and fuel research that took me to several states and had me interviewing people from around the world).
Because in the end, I'm not sure that the Wiki model really works. It is now being applied to all sorts of endeavors, from sites about cars to a "how to" site that frequently makes appearances in my daily links. The concept is with multiple minds tweaking, editing and contributing, an informational piece of writing becomes more accurate and more trustworthy.
Yet there's a reason why almost every single one of the estimated 1,500 articles I've written over the past ten years or so have my byline right under the headline, and it's not to give me a little ego boost every time I get to see my name in print. It's an accountability issue that let's people find me when I mess up.
As an individual am I smarter and a better writer than the hundreds of people working on a Wiki entry? Probably not. But the group think problems now being exposed in academic studies, and -- to use a second cliché -- the "one bad apple spoils the bunch" principle allows people or groups of people to push agendas and distort information to their liking on sites like Wikipedia.Labels: education, internet, life
Posted at 6:44 AM
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