Wikipedia and truth, Part 1

I regret having missed the last LITA forum, primarily because I saw that Amy Bruckman would be speaking on the nature of truth in the age of Wikipedia. Her keynote, How Wikipedia Really Works, and What This Means for the Nature of “Truth”, is, sadly, not available online, so all I have to give you are these Twitter highlights praising the relevance and instructiveness of her presentation and this article from American Libraries. Granted, I cannot access Bruckman’s original lecture, so it would be irresponsible for me to discuss her position. Instead, I’ll direct my attention at the tweets and descriptions offered by her audience members.

First, a pair of problematic tweets:

1. refereed journal articles out of date the minute they are published, wikipedia updated/corrected every second (@amyddiane)
2. A peer reviewed journal is out of date the minute it is published. Wiki articles on popular topics are updated constantly. (@mfrisque)

These first two tweets point to a common misconception regarding the merits of currency; I’ll call it the fallacy of the real-time update, a variant of the argumentum ad novitatum. Briefly, many of Wikipedia’s proponents stress that the flexibility inherent in the ability to update an article at any time leads to greater accuracy. That is, the constant maintenance of Wiki articles ensures that they are the most current and therefore the most accurate information sources. The fallacy arises when we conflate accuracy with currency. Specifically, the truth of a proposition (or set of propositions) is independent of when it was communicated. Sure, there are many areas of inquiry where currency is important, but can you really argue that the accuracy of an article about Plato is enhanced by its currency? Currency is important, but it is entirely separate from accuracy.

Of course, the fallacy of the constant edit is undermined by Wikipedia’s own article editing guidelines that stress the importance of verifiability, not truth, in establishing the accuracy of content. Put simply, one criterion for inclusion in Wikipedia is that the information comes from a reliable, approved external source…preferably a peer-reviewed article.

And this fallacy is not limited to Wikipedia. There are countless examples of blog posts praising Twitter as a wonderful source for news and information because it is a live stream. This is simply wrong. Twitter is a wonderful source for real-time data, but it takes time to separate the wheat from the chaff and determine which tweets are accurate. Twitter as a wonderful source for news and information and it is a live stream, not because it is a live stream.

Again, my point is not that currency is unimportant. Currency is very, very, very important. My point is that the tweets listed above seem to conflate currency with accuracy, proffering real-time updates as a cure for the hopelessly out-of-date world of academic publishing when, in reality, this is simply a non sequitur.

Perhaps, though, the claims about constant updating are more relative; Wikipedia is simply more accurate than competing resources, due to its currency. This, too, is misguided. Again, certain content areas benefit from constant updates and others do not.

Given the length of this post, I’ll quit here and save the other problematic tweets for the next post. 

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